


Handling Sin

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Escorts, Drunken Shenanigans, Emily and Reid are both shitty adults, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Pseudonyms, Reckless Indifference to One's Wellbeing, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, They get better, Time Skips, pool kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-05 21:33:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 61,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16375379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: When Emily is twenty-nine, she decides to aggravate her mother by showing up at a diplomatic function with a man ten years younger on her arm. She’s aware that he’s an escort using her to pay his way through college, that he’s given her a false name and that they really don’t know each other at all—but what she really doesn’t understand is just how this man she doesn’t know has quickly become all-important to her, or just why he worries so much about the way she’s living her life.Five years later, when she finds that same man now working a desk at her dream job, she’s given the unanticipated second-chance to answer both questions.





	1. 01 - 03

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blythechild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/gifts).



> A birthday gift to the wonderful Blythechild as well as incorporating prompts from the Bingo Bango Bongo: ‘drunk kissing’, ‘cuddling’, ‘teaching’, ‘(smutty) spa/hot-tub’, & ‘hooker/sex-work’.

_Night 01. Room 302. October 02, 1999. 17:01._

Emily Prentiss isn’t the kind of person to throw a man to the wolves, especially not a man as fresh-faced as this one. When she answers the hotel door to him on this brisk October evening, he’s every bit as pretty as the glossy picture in the book she’d been given had promised. The same worried eyes hidden under the unconsciously messy bangs, the same shy mouth, the same cheekbones she can imagine someone his age dreaming of breaking themselves open on.

Fuck, she’s at least ten years older than him and she’s thinking of the kinds of sinful things you could do with a face like that, even though that’s not her intention at all. Besides, as she’d been informed both by the lady she’d done business with initially and the small print of the contract she’d signed: the boys are breakable—don’t break them. Breaking them, Emily assumes, includes many things, one of which is fucking them. Another is probably loving them, since she doubts too many escorts keep on working once they’ve got a ring on their finger and prospects outside of looking pretty every other night for a stranger on their arm.

Luckily, she doubts that’s going to be a problem here, no matter how nice ‘Robert Manning’ looks in black tie tailored sharply to his slender body.

“Miss Prentiss,” he chokes out, eyes going a little bit wider when his attempted smooth greeting falters.

She rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t call me miss.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says with a flicker of humour in those hazel eyes, stepping inside without missing a beat.

“Ma’am is my mother,” she snips, already wondering if this is a mistake. But even if it is, it’s Elizabeth’s money that’d went towards buying Emily her date for tonight—and there’s a kind of beautiful wilfulness in that, isn’t there? Maybe it will finally get Elizabeth off Emily’s ass about creating offspring that isn’t an embarrassment, even if Emily doesn’t mention the fact that the man staring awkwardly at her is some out-of-luck college student playing discount hooker on the side. Emily rocking up to a diplomatic dinner with a—she pauses, looking at him again.

“How old are you?” she asks, because the book had said he was twenty, but she knows that’s probably about as true as his name is. At least she’s reasonably sure he’s of age: the place is well known enough that she seriously doubts they’d risk their business with minors, but she’s an FBI agent. She knows sometimes things that look legit, aren’t. “And don’t lie to me. I’ll know.”

He studies her for a second, Adam’s apple bobbing on his throat as he swallows around the nerves she’s assailing him with. “Nineteen,” he says finally, mouth quirking. She frowns. “…in twenty-six days. I’m legal.”

“You’re a child,” she mutters, shaking her head at him. Well, he’ll certainly do. ‘Hello, Mother, here’s my boyfriend’ indeed. See if she’s forced into any more functions after _this._

“This might be impertinent, but isn’t that the point?” His voice is still wary as he says this, but he says it anyway and she appreciates that. For all his nervous twitching, he has spine. “You deliberately picked me out, even though there are other men much more handsome or suave in the selection you were given and despite the fact that Caroline would have warned you that I’m new. It must be because I’m the youngest at our service, by far—that wasn’t an accident. And…”

Now he trails off, which does nothing but serve to pique her interest further. Even though she needs to finish getting ready for this dinner from hell, she leans against the dresser and waits for him to continue, gesturing at him to do so when he seems inclined to say nothing instead.

“And I don’t think it’s because you’re looking for an expensive night in bed,” he says finally, mouth shaping the words strangely as his cheeks flare red. He’s embarrassed. It’s sweet. She wonders if he has a girlfriend as young and sweet as he is. “You would have also been warned that we’re not prostitutes, despite rumours.”

“With an emphasis on how sweet and innocent you in particular are,” she half reassures, half teases him, seeing an almost-scowl flicker across his features. “Don’t worry, Robbie, I don’t plan on seducing your pretty face. All you need to do is endure my mother and her contemporaries for seven hours and then you’re free to go your merry way.”

“Ambassador Prentiss,” he says, her heartrate rocketing for a second as her brain takes the fact that he already knows her mother and spins that a thousand different ways at once, all terrifying. “I looked you up on the cab ride over. Your mother is an impressive woman. You yourself are much more discreet, I couldn’t find anything. Having met you, I doubt that means you’re any less impressive, though.”

“How long was your cab ride?” she asks, wondering just how much he’d read.

“Ten minutes.” He nods to the windows, the rain pattering gently against them, and shrugs. “It was long enough.”

“Alright,” she says finally, deciding to query him once they’re acceptably late to dinner. After all, she has seven hours with this man to kill—surely enough time to learn even a little about him. And, really, if she can’t profile an escort in seven hours, then what business does she have aiming for the BAU? “Well, I need to finish getting ready, Robbie. Make yourself comfortable. I’d recommend alcohol, if you were old enough, but as it is I guess you’ll just have to face her as you are. If you upset her, I’ll double your tip.”

The look he gives her is startled enough to be amusing, his hand flicking up like he’s adjusting absent glasses. “And how do you suggest I ‘upset’ her?” he asks.

She smirks. “Talking about our sex life would be a _fantastic_ start.”

 

_Night 01. Room 302. October 02, 1999. 23:17._

Robert outdoes himself at the dinner. He’s spectacularly awkward in a way Emily envies, having managed to derail five separate conversations into discussions of particle physics and string theory and awkwardly segueing innuendoes into his stream-of-consciousness rambles every time Emily nudges his foot with hers. By the time the night comes to a close, Emily’s drunk and Elizabeth’s a glorious shade of fucked off and, honestly, isn’t that just the best way it could have gone?

He has to pour her back into the hotel room she’s booked for the night to avoid having to stumble home drunk or give away her apartment address to a random escort, staggering through the door with his hand on her arm before making her way unerringly to the mini-bar. When she turns, miniatures in hand, he’s standing gawkily in the entranceway looking very out of place despite his nice suit.

“Night is young, Robbie, my boy,” she informs him, cocking her hip against the counter to hide how wobbly she is right now and feeling all kinds of hot and bothered about his pretty, young mouth. “Stay a while. Come on, take advantage of the idiot you’re billing—sit and have a drink with me.”

“I’m eighteen,” he comments despite walking forward and taking the miniatures from her. Instead of popping the top for himself, he puts them aside, and she scowls at him. “And you’re very drunk. Perhaps bed would be a better idea?”

Now that _is_ an idea.

“Tell me about yourself,” she demands, catching his ridiculous hands with hers and dragging him closer. He comes, sighing and steadying them both against the counter as he gives her the same rueful look he’d given her at dinner when Elizabeth’s comments on Emily ‘ruining herself’ had begun to dig deep enough that she’d reached for the wine bottle instead of her glass. “Come on, don’t be a stranger. God, you’ve got fantastic hands.”

He looks startled, staring down at his hands as she holds them up and studies them. They’re wide and narrow and soft, definitely not blue-collar hands. No callouses, no scars, no hardened tissue showing where he’s overcome trouble and come out tougher. He’s a soft pretty-boy who doesn’t realise how hard he’ll crash up against the world, she decides, shaking her head a bit at him and all the other babies out there who don’t know that life is hell and you’ve got to build callouses against that.

“I can’t think what would possibly interest you about me,” he says, which is wrong wrong wrong. Everything about him is fascinating, even when she’s not spinning a bit and letting go of his hands to grab the closest miniature. Fuck him, she’s earned this. A night with Elizabeth is enough to get anyone drinking… and god, the worst bit about drinking isn’t the hangover or the wine-gut, but how stupid it makes her about things like interrogating her breakable escort, or considering breaking him, just a little, if he’ll let her.

Fuck he’s pretty.

“Your name?” she tries, earning a laugh. That’s okay: she’d known he wasn’t going to answer that. Robbie he remains. “Favourite book?”

“I’ve never read a book I haven’t loved on some level.”

“How many books have you read?”

He pauses before answering that with: “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. My mother was a professor of fifteenth-century literature. I’m, ah, well-read.”

See? _Weird_ , but in such a spectacular way. She boosts herself back up so her ass is on the counter and she can look him eye to eye, earning a startled hiss from him as he lurches forward in a rush of ungainly, barely grown limbs to stop her from pitching off the edge.

“Fair warning,” she tells him, narrowing her eyes and trying to gauge his reaction. “I get handsy when drunk around impressive men. Or women. Whatever. I’m a slut for a clever mouth.”

He stares, pink in his cheeks and mouth a little open.

“I, uh…” But his hands are more confident than his voice, catching the bottle in her hand before she can drain it. “I’m not going to have, uh, sex with you, Miss Prentiss.” _Miss_ Prentiss again, is it? But she respects his boundaries and doesn’t haul him forward by his belt buckle, even letting him take the bottle back from her. Despite this, she can tell that he knows she’s thinking about his dick right now, despite his age, despite his breakable status, despite the fact that’s he’s no hooker. And he murmurs, “You think I’m impressive?” while still looking flushed and shy.

“Favourite colour?” she says, determined to learn something about him and without answering his question.

“That’s contextual.” At her stare, he clarifies. “Any colour is beautiful in the right framework.”

“In this framework?”

He looks right at her, square in her stupid, drunk face, and says: “Tonight, I’m partial to sapphire blue.”

She swallows and doesn’t look down at the shade of her dress. “Fucken hell,” she mutters, closing her eyes for a second and suddenly feeling tired and ancient and alone. “I’m too old for you. You’re a pretty fantasy for me, but I’m nothing you’d want. You’re probably gay, anyway.”

“I’m not gay. And you’re not old. But I’m also not going to sleep with a client, especially not a drunk one. What will it take to get you to agree to go to bed?”

“Water, probably.” She doesn’t say the sly thought that flickers through her brain—his sharp cheekbones cutting a line between her legs—because she’s been a dirty old pervert enough for one night. “You should probably get your money and leave before I completely ruin the illusion you’ve built of me while trying to get out of this thing. I can barely get the zip down when sober.”

That earns a laugh, his hands in hers as he guides her down from the counter and leads her to the double bed. “If you turn around, I’ll tell you one thing about myself,” he says.

She turns, feeling his hand on the zip and putting her own arms up to stop the dress from falling forward. Some decorum must remain, she figures, even if she’s never going to see Robbie and his cheekbones again. “Do I get to pick? How about… are you a virgin?”

He makes a soft scoffing noise behind her, fingers sliding down her spine along the zip. Really, he doesn’t need to be undoing it _that_ slowly, lining a trail of fire down her back that keeps going even when he stops. It’s just unnecessary. “Would it change anything if I am?”

Not really. Right now, she wants him because she’s drunk and he’s gorgeous. Tomorrow? Probably. She’d be pretty sour with herself being _that_ person for a random boy whose name she doesn’t even know.

“Maybe.”

“Then I’m not answering. And you’ve wasted your one question on that.”

She takes that as a confirmation and shakes her head: breakable indeed. “You’re in the wrong job.”

“And you don’t like not knowing things.” He’s smiling when she looks at him, still a little pink and with his gaze switching from her bare back to his hands. Seven shades of shy and she can see his wide, hungry pupils—it’s a small boost to her confidence that he clearly wants her too, he’s just too moral to make a move. “Finish getting undressed. I’ll get you your water and then leave. Oh, Emily?”

“Yeah?” She has to call it after him as he vanishes to the kitchenette, leaving her to strip to nothing and slide between the covers, not bothering with clothes. He can’t see anything anyway except the obvious truth of the pile of clothes on the floor that he cautiously steps over when he returns, glass in hand.

“I won’t bill you for the last hour,” he says with another of his—she’s sure they’re his trademarked now—shy smiles. “Thank you for the dinner and company. It was lovely, even if I was a mess.”

“Your name?” she calls after him, but all she gets back in return is a chuckle and the sound of the door closing behind him.

In the morning, when she wakes with a thudding head and dry mouth, she decides that not knowing this is unacceptable. After all, he’s not wrong: she’s always hated being left in the dark.

 

_Night 02. Room 302. December 31, 1999. 17:59._

“Same room? You’re a woman of habit.” He’s looking at her with that same look he’d given her the first time: slightly wary, desperate to please.

“Robert Manning,” she says, seeing his stare turn odd. “Also known as Robert de Brunne, an English chronicler and Gilbertine monk. Am I wrong?”

He keeps staring.

“It was that or Robert Manning the Irish engineer,” she adds, stepping aside to let him sidle in, clearly thrown. Tonight, he’s dressed just as pretty as before, except he’s wearing cologne. It’s a sharp scent, masculine and mature, and she doesn’t like it. He’d been sweeter last time, scented simply with his soaps and shampoos: a clean, human smell. Now, he smells like a pantomime, like he’s trying to present himself as someone else. “So, am I wrong? You picked your pseudonym for a reason. I think you do everything for a reason, including high-class escorting.”

“You’re not… wrong,” he says finally. “How did you know? That’s an obscurely large leap to make based on nothing but a suspicion that I’d choose my name for a reason.”

“Your mother,” she says, satisfied. “You seemed intent when you mentioned her last time. A question about books as a hobby, a private undertaking, and your mind went immediately to her. Obviously, you love reading and you clearly love _her_ , so when I looked you up and a thirteenth-century poet came up with that name… Well, that’s just obvious, isn’t it?”

He hums, leaning back against the wall and thinking for a moment, long fingers tapping at his side. “If I love my mother so much, why am I here with you on New Year’s Eve ushering in the new millennium with a client instead of being with her or other companions?” he asks, narrowing his shoulders in a way that tells her he’s making himself vulnerable again with that question. Tempting her dangerously close.

There’s a pause before she responds to that… carefully.

“You don’t really want me to answer that,” she says, smoothing her hands down the dress she’d bought for this occasion. Sapphire blue again, for no reason except it’d been nice, that first time, feeling pretty in his eyes. A reminder that she’s twenty-nine, not dead, and maybe not as past it as she feels sometimes. There’s not much call for feeling pretty at the FBI, where everyday she’s doing everything she can to make sure the men there don’t see her as a woman at all. “You’re just testing to see if I _would_.”

He smiles tightly, but doesn’t answer, shoulders loosening slightly.

“What exactly is it that you _do?”_ he asks her as she moves to find her shoes. “I know you’re an FBI agent from your mother’s comments. I wasn’t aware that field agents needed to be quite as obtrusively discerning as you’ve proven to be.”

“They don’t.” She straightens, wincing as a waft of the cologne hits her again. It’s not a bad scent—she just doesn’t like it on _him._ It smells too much like… well, the kind of guys she usually dates. “Behavioural analysts do.”

“Ah. High goals?”

“High are the only goals worth having.” She leans closer to him, sniffing at his throat and seeing him jolt back, startled. “Hey, Robbie? Before we leave, let’s wash that off, huh? And whoever told you it was a good idea was _wrong.”_

Robert frowns, brushing his fingers against his skin as though searching for wayward traces of scent. “They told me it would make me seem more attainable, to assist with client retention.”

That earns a laugh, the first one for the night since she’s spent it all before this dreading her mother’s company. Somehow, with him there, even that doesn’t quite seem as dreadful anymore. “Attainable isn’t what they meant, kiddo. The word they were looking for is ‘fuckable’ and, trust me. That’ll only get you hurt.”

Take it from her as someone who knows: easy is nothing but.

 

_Night 02. Room 302. January 01, 2000. 02:26._

She’s drunk again and ready to admit that she’s definitely not showcasing her best side to him. Tonight had been brutal, with Elizabeth airing the sharpest edge of her tongue on them both. She’s sorry, for everything really, but especially for putting him in that situation.

“Didn’t even say happy birthday to you,” she mumbles from the bathroom, hearing his nice shoes tapping across the floorboards towards her. “Sorry for that too.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

The tiles under her are a disgusting purple and grey, swirled together like the ghost of fashion past. She stares at it and groans as her gut lurches again, his shoes tap tap tapping right on in as he comes up behind her and rests his hand between her shoulder-blades, the other holding a glass of water. When he crouches beside her, his knees don’t pop, and she hates him for his enviable youth and innocence and just—

“It was. You’re nineteen now, right? Twenty-eighth of October. So, happy birthday for that. And Happy New Year, new millennium, for tonight… sorry you’re spending it with me.”

Robert makes a soft noise, tipping the glass closer in a silent command for her to drink. “Thank you for remembering,” he says first, in the kind of voice she doesn’t really know how to unpack. “Why do you do this? Validate her beliefs about you.”

“How is it validating them if they’re true to begin with? I’m just confirming them.” She leans her chin on the toilet seat for a second before thinking twice about that and sitting back, looking around for something to wash her face. Everything is gross, everything feels awful, and she hates DC so much. A town as political as her mother, just as false. “Don’t sit there and judge me, pretty boy, you’ve got your own shit going on.”

“Do I?” Up goes his eyebrow, his mouth doing a strange, nervous twist. He’s a conundrum, often shy, sometimes brave, always hyper-intelligent and seemingly ashamed of that, and she can’t get a fucking read on him and that pisses her off. And she still doesn’t know his name. “Well, I guess I’m here, aren’t I? Does that bother you? That I’m here because you’re paying me?”

Yes.

No?

“I don’t know.” That’s the most honest answer she can give. “Probably not. You piss me off, you and your… face.”

Blinking. She hates how he blinks when he’s surprised, slightly out of sync with the rest of himself like he’s an android glitching over an update. “It’s not the nicest face, but I—” he begins, sounding affronted.

“Not your _face_ , just _you._ You’re so fucking _vulnerable._ I hate that—don’t you hate that?”

And now he’s looking at her, really looking at her, and she wants up off these horrible tiles but doesn’t know how to ask him to lend her a hand. God, she still needs to get out of her dress, into bed; the night seems longer, suddenly, and lonely.

“I don’t think I’m vulnerable,” he replies, standing—knees still silent—and offering his hand. “I’m not the one vomiting expensive wine into a hotel toilet.”

“You are,” she promises him, because aren’t they all? She sure as hell is. “You’ll see. It’s only a matter of time before someone shatters you.”

She wonders if that someone will be her. She’s broken people just as kind as him before.

In many ways, he reminds her painfully of Matthew.

 

_Night 02. Room 302. January 01, 2000. 09:32._

He’s still there when she wakes up, sitting in an armchair with the book she’s been reading on his knee. “Check-out is in an hour and a half,” he says without looking at her, eyes flickering quickly across the page.

“Hope you’re not going to bill me for this,” she mutters, lowering her head back into the pillows and hating the sun and the birds screaming outside.

He chuckles, a low, deep sound that hurts. “Was worried about you. I don’t charge for my own catastrophising.”

“Wise. Hey, Robbie?”

“Mmm?” She hears the pages beginning to turn again, too fast for him to be reading. “If you’re about to ask my name, I’m still not going to tell you. Why do you want it so bad?”

That’s an easy one. There’s a glass of water by her bed and she drinks it and wonders if there are painkillers here, somewhere. “I don’t trust people who use false names.”

“You don’t trust anyone.”

He’s not wrong but she doesn’t tell him that, just mutters, “Well look out Prentiss, here comes a little profiler to steal your dream job,” and curls back under the blankets. It’s cold. She’s cold. Today is a problem for future Emily. “Don’t reckon I can pay you extra to get in here and share heat? Clothed, if you want. Or not.”

All he does in reply is laugh.

_Night 03. Room 408. April 04, 2000. 17:31._

She doesn’t see him again until spring and, to be honest, she doesn’t even really need a date for tonight—pretend or otherwise. But he’s been on her mind since that morning, always lurking in the corner like he has an armchair and a book set up there with the early morning light streaming in around him. It’s remarkable, really, how such a split-second image has been burned into her brain, seared right in there always ready to pop out at the most inopportune moment. She can’t even begin to understand the hold he has on her thoughts.

It’s a different hotel room tonight, probably as an apology for the last two times she’s seen him, and she refuses to analyse why she cares so much about this man’s opinion of her when she doesn’t even know his name.

“Door’s open,” she calls when she hears the polite knock. She knows it’s him. It’s exactly one minute past the time she told him to get here, and he hasn’t been late yet. Painfully punctual is his MO. And, shit, maybe she’s kind of missed having someone to talk to outside of work who can’t really hurt her because he’s entirely disconnected from the rest of her shitty world.

“Emily, hello,” he says from behind her, a heartfelt kind of pleasure in it. It’s how a friend would greet a friend, not an escort his client, and she shakes herself a bit at how warm that makes her feel.

Fuck, she’s lonely.

“Robbie-boy, hell—” She turns and stops, narrowing her eyes at him. The suit is familiar; it’s the same one he wore the first time they’d met. His hair is a little longer but just as fussily combed, his bangs just as wayward over those changeable eyes. To the untrained eye, he looks much the same despite the months that have passed. But hers isn’t untrained, and he’s not the same. “You look like shit.”

“Well, thanks.” His is a wry look as he steps closer, leaning a little on the counter. There are swollen shadows under both his eyes, ringed in purple and red. His skin looks sallow, pulled tight around a downturned mouth determinedly tipped upwards. The smile he gives her is wan, all the colour leeched from it. “You, on the other hand, look lovely. Your mother again?”

She continues staring intently at him, seeing his gaze flicker nervously away, a nerve under his eye jumping. He’s scared. Of what? Of her?

“Don’t turn the subject back on me. Why do you look so tired? Have you been sick?” God, she’s turning into her mother, fussing over him like a hen while he looks nothing but uncomfortable. It’s a sticky day, too warm for spring, and she’s not quite ready yet. “Take your suit jacket off, sit down. I still have my hair to do. You’re sweating.”

None of that is worded as a request or a question.

He slips his suit jacket off with the kind of stilted movements that mean he doesn’t really want to, but that doesn’t bother her; if he was _that_ against it, he could have told her to go jump. He knows her well enough by now that he’d still get paid even if he said no to her. God knows, he’s smart enough to say no every other time.

She spots them instantly. Maybe his cuffs would have hidden them, but his shirt is a size and a half too small and they sit too high up his arms.

“Don’t,” he says sourly, the soft look vanishing from his expression for the first time since she’s known him. Folding back into himself and looking almost resigned to her scorn, he scrubs the fingers of one hand across his wrist, across the yellowed line of bruising left there in a blurry arc. “They’re nothing.”

“Movies always get it wrong,” she says. Instead of continuing to get ready, she sits on the bed and gestures to the chair across from her. He looks like he needs the rest and, confirming that, when he sits it’s more like collapsing, like an old tree folding inwards. “Fingerprints don’t bruise in the shape of a hand. The bruise spreads outward from each contact point and often blurs together. Did you know that?”

“Yes.” His fingers scrub harder, like he can rub away the yellowed crescent moon betraying him. “Would you believe me if I told you I asked to be held down?”

“No. Was it consensual?” If she’s a little sharp in asking, it’s because she’s been shaken free of the pretty fantasy she’s been hiding in, where maybe, just maybe, this fresh-faced babe straight out of college could be someone more like a friend to her—but now, violently, here’s a reminder of what he is to her, and to others. Others who aren’t her. Others who could be dangerous.

“It wasn’t _anything_. Why are you so determined to read into this?”

She turns his own words back on him, maybe betraying herself a little in the doing so despite not wanting him to know that she’s met with him three times now and she, what? Cares about him? She doesn’t _know_ him. “You said it yourself, you’re not a hooker. You say you don’t fuck the clients, and I _know_ you don’t. You’re attracted to me and you wouldn’t sleep with me either time I asked, and no virgin asks to be pinned down their first time.”

His stare is incendiary, like he’s annoyed that she pays so much attention to him—or like he’s not used to it. “You’ve met me twice in the guise of a business relationship. If this is the best profiling you have, I have doubts about your career intentions.”

That’s bitchy. She’s gotten to him.

“Here’s a theory, let me posit it to you.” She makes herself comfy on the bed before continuing, ignoring his, “We’re going to be late.” This is more important. “You look exhausted. Your clothes are nice but the same as you’ve worn previously. It’s sloppy to wear the same outfit twice with the same client in such short succession and you’re not sloppy, so I assume you had no choice. This job pays nicely, I know because I slip extra in every time to what is already a substantial amount, so you should be able to afford new clothes—but you haven’t bought them. You only have a few good suits and you have to reuse them. Money is tight, why? Drugs? You look desperate and stressed enough that it could be drugs.”

He snaps, “No,” and hunkers deeper into the chair, eyes flickering like he’s fighting sleep for a moment. She wonders when the last time he slept was, _really_ slept.

“Whatever the reason is, you’re broke and worried and someone offered you extra for a tumble, which you rationalised by thinking that you’re _not_ a whore, only for them to proceed to treat you like one, huh?”

Silence. For a heartbeat, she’s sorry. He looks miserable, and he’s nowhere near as good at hiding his feelings as she is.

“Robert…”

“They didn’t ask. They just… assumed. I declined and left once extracting myself from them. They’ve been removed from our client list and won’t be using our services again.” Robert gives her a cool look, almost daring. “There. I’m unsullied. That’s what you’re into, isn’t it? How young and untouched I am? Is that your kink?”

Her turn to be blasted, but she’s dealt with that her whole life. She doesn’t flinch. Instead, she stands and goes for her bag, pulling out pyjamas and smirking at his confused look.

“Change of plans,” she informs him firmly, turning and studying him. “I’ll pay you double to stay here and watch shitty horror movies with me, deal?”

“But your mother—”

“I don’t want to spend the night being bitched at by her, I want to spend the night here being lazy and eating pizza and ice cream. I’m the customer, am I not? Don’t I have a say?”

He gives her a wary look, all doe-eyed worry that she hates. See? Vulnerable. “I’m not—”

She cuts him off right there. “Don’t even. We’re watching movies, Robbie. That’s it. Don’t even imply that I’d proposition you while you’ve still got bruises from the last asshole who assumed. Look at me, right now.” He does. “Every time I’ve propositioned you I’ve done it because you’re damn good looking and incredibly clever and those are both things I like, especially when drunk—it had nothing to do with you being here as an escort. I wouldn’t have ever paid you for sex, do you understand? I’m not holding that power over you, especially not if you’re desperate.”

“But you’ll pay me double to watch movies?”

And sleep, she thinks, but doesn’t say. She doubts he’ll make it through one movie before he’s out like a light, looking that tired.

“Exactly. So, are you in?”

 

_Night 03. Room 408. April 04, 2000. 11:29._

The movie ends and she hits the mute button fast before the rock music over the credits can startle him awake. As the night had wound on, he’d dropped his frightened rabbit act a little and relaxed around her, finally deigning to join her on the bed with the pizza and popcorn. Now, with the clutter of the night still tossed around him, he’s curled on his side and breathing deeply, so fast asleep that she’s pretty sure she could balance the pizza box on his head and he wouldn’t even blink.

She inches out of the bed, intending to make a nest on the couch—but his breathing pauses and he sleepily mumbles, “If you get on that couch, I’ll leave. I’m not taking the bed you paid for.”

Bullshit he’s not. His voice is the exhausted kind of slurred that she knows means he’s barely awake, not enough to get up and leave. But she pauses anyway, moving the popcorn bowl away in case he jolts and knocks it.

“Sleepover it is,” she says finally, sliding back into the bed and curling on her side, facing him. “Have you ever even shared a bed with a woman before? Or are you just bolder when sleep-deprived?”

But he’s already asleep.

_Night 03. Room 408. April 05, 2000: 05:13._

It’s barely five a.m. when he sneaks out of the bed, padding in his socks across the room to find his shoes. Honed from years in the field, she wakes to his quiet movements and watches his shape shift about in the gloom.

“Name?” she asks when she hears the handle of the door turn gently.

“Goodnight, Emily,” he says, a smile hidden in the shadows of the early morning. Then he’s gone, and she rolls into the warm space he’s left in the bed and drifts lazily back to sleep.


	2. 16

_Night 16. Room 6A. August 17, 2000. 21:48._

“Can you swim?”

The look Robert gives her implies that their strange-almost-friendship thing they’ve got going will come to an abrupt and violent end if she tries to get him into the pool lapping lazily outside the thrown open balcony doors of their hotel room, but she grins back, unafraid. They’ve spent the last two visits marathoning _Buffy,_ but the night air tonight is too gorgeous to waste.

Neither is even pretending that she’s hiring him for a reason other than being lonely anymore. She’s starting to think that’s probably because he’s lonely too.

“I grew up in Vegas,” he says eventually, Emily filing that away with every other titbit of information she’s managed to glean from him. “I can swim.”

“Isn’t Vegas in a desert?”

“Swimming pools exist, Emily.” The dry way he says her name cracks her up, along with the level stare he sends her way: the long-suffering adult in the room having to look after his younger, wilder friend. To complete that feeling, she pokes her tongue out at him and gets a piece of popcorn lobbed at her head instead. “I _can_ swim, that’s not to say I _will_ swim. Besides, I didn’t bring anything to swim in.”

“It’s almost ten p.m.,” she points out cheekily. “I hear bathing costumes are optional after midnight. And it’s a private pool, buddy. Walls and everything.”

All she gets in return is a grunt as he burrows back into the couch and stares at the TV, mouth twisted unhappily. He’s been moody all night, his responses to her teasing sharper than usual and less liable to go off on long-winded tangents about whatever esoteric fact pops into his overactive mind. And he’d eaten more than his share of the meal she’d bought them, which is unusual—not that she’d minded, since she’d taken it on herself recently to feed him when bogarting his time like this, but usually he’s meticulous in making sure she takes the lion’s share.

Grabbing a pillow, she encroaches on his side of the couch like an eel, winding behind him until he makes an irritated noise and is forced to wiggle forward while twitching every time she touches him. Before he can escape, she thumps the pillow on his chest and leans on it, leaving their gazes startlingly close as she stares him down.

“What are you _doing?”_ he wheezes, trying to escape and failing, having been very neatly pinned down before he’d even noticed the danger. “You’re like a cat. What?”

“When that clock hits midnight, I’m going to go for a swim,” she informs him, reading his expression carefully as consternation and dismay flicker evenly across his features. “I’m not going to force you, but I’d really like it if you came with me because it’s hot as hell right now. Why do you keep flinching?”

“I’m not used to being touched,” he responds, the same shortness back in his tone. When she raises her eyebrows and goes to lift her weight off of him, he shakes his head. “No, it’s fine, I’m just… let me adjust. Don’t look at me like that, I’m not _broken.”_

She hadn’t been giving him any kind of look to suggest that.

“You and me, that pool, midnight,” she says instead, making sure he sees how much she wants this. “Even if you don’t swim, we’re going to _talk.”_

“Oh no,” he responds.

 

_Night 16. Room 6A. August 18, 2000. 00:43._

Okay, so she’s actually twelve-years-old, she’ll admit that. In her defence, he’d made such a tantalising target sitting there on the edge of the pool, feet in and nothing else with his gaze locked on the sky and looking sad and distracted all at once.

Is it really any wonder she’d pushed him in?

Once he’s finished scolding and joined her in laughing at his wet-puppy look, he paddles to the edge and hangs there thoughtfully, looking down at his clothes like he’s tossing up what to do now. It is a lot nicer in the pool than it is out of it, the heat oppressive even this late at night and the lights set into the bottom of the pool casting blue splashes of illumination on his sodden black trousers. She swims up behind him, careful to be quiet so that the first hint he has of her approach is her hand on the small of his back as she surfaces beside him.

“I retract my statement,” he says, turning and treading water in order to face her. “You’re more an otter than a cat.”

“Otters are more fun than cats,” she responds pertly, bringing her hands to his shirt buttons and undoing three slowly, letting him stop her if he wants to. “Come on. No one is around, and you’re already wet.”

“Thanks to _someone_.” He doesn’t stop her, but he doesn’t help her either, just looked down at her hands with his cheeks flaming pink. He’s an enigma like this: sometimes brave, sometimes charming, always awkward, often fraught. She can’t get a read on him, except to sometimes figure he’s naturally introverted and forcing himself to be more _everything_ out of, she assumes, desperation. This doesn’t come naturally to him and maybe that’s why he likes these nights, with her. She’s not paying him to be anyone other than who he is—except right now, as his shirt opens under her hands that are shaking despite the heat, a strange zip-shock of something snapping between them. Under her hands, his breathing stills suddenly.

She wonders if he’s afraid of her touching him still.

“I can…” She trails off and lets her hands slip back into the water, feeling uncertain and awkward suddenly. Like she’s the nineteen-year-old, not him, the one left treading water trying to stay afloat.

“No, it’s fine.” His voice is soft but she doesn’t follow the invitation, keeping a small distance between them as he finishes what she started, turning his back to pull his shirt off and fold it neatly despite the water dripping from it. His trousers follow in an ungainly struggle against the water that he barely wins, and he wraps his arms around his torso and hugs himself as he faces her, now looking even more worried in just his briefs and nothing else. “I feel like I got the worse end of the deal here.” She assumes he’s referring to the fact that she _does_ have a swimsuit on—always prepared—and raises her eyebrows at him, which earns a hurried, “Not that I’m implying that you should take them off. I’m not. Honest.”

She believes him. He’s many things, but rarely that suave. Besides, she’s been distracted by his chest, paddling forward and glancing at him for permission before brushing her fingers down his front. He trembles under the touch, tensing as she traces the line of his ribs.

“You’ve lost more weight,” she guesses, trying to gauge how skinny he is now compared to the man she’d slipped her arm around those months ago, when she’d hired him the first time. “Haven’t you?”

“Not really,” he lies, twisting out of her grip before diving into the water and swimming away with a swiftness that startles her and leaves her laughing and diving after him. An effective way to forestall questioning, for sure. She hopes the suspects at work don’t learn it from him.

 

_Night 16. Room 6A. August 18, 2000. 03:02._

“So,” she says after, as they sit on her balcony still wet from the pool and with an unlit cigarette slipped between her lips as she tosses up whether to give up on the last three months of quitting. “Are you going to tell me why you’re working yourself to death?”

“I’m not working myself to death,” says Robert, entirely expectedly. But she’d be a shit FBI agent if she gave up that easily.

“Bull you’re not. You can barely stay awake and you’ve lost weight. You tired fast tonight, even just messing around in the pool, and I know you’re studying yet you’ve never said no to a booking with me, no matter how late notice. Related thought, I’m paying you extra for tonight.”

He looks at her, hands pausing as he lowers the towel he’s been using to ruffle his hair dry. It’s left it looking fluffy and wiry with cowlicks threatening to take over the lot and she bites her lip to avoids laughing at it, which he’ll misconstrue as aimed at him as a person and not just his silly hair.

“You’re paying me extra because you feel sorry for me or because I took most of my clothes off?” He words it like a joke, but there’s a tension in his shoulders she hates; however, she’d be a liar if she said she hadn’t appreciated how he’d looked climbing out of the pool with his briefs clinging tight and wet to absolutely everything.

“Neither. I’m paying you extra because you look hungry and I’m a sucker for those sad adverts with the starving kids. It’s not _pity,_ it’s keeping you alive so I don’t have to train someone else to put up with my _Buffy_ marathons and bad takeout after you kick the bucket from overwork.” She’s quiet for a second, wondering how far she should take this, before deciding fuck it. Might as well. “If you want to tell me what’s weighing on those skinny shoulders of yours that’s okay too, you know. I’m here, and I already paid for the whole night.”

“I’m not sure acting as my therapist was part of the deal,” he responds quietly, but she can see that he’s going to talk. He has to. He’s too tired and sad to _not_ , with everything that’s bothering him all bubbled up inside and knotting him up tight. “May I ask a favour?”

“Shoot.”

Whatever she’s expecting, it’s not what she gets.

“Would you kiss me?” he asks in that same quiet, worried voice, so intently that for the longest time she’s not sure she even heard him properly. That time stretches on and on in what turns out to be a painfully long pause where she’s sitting there staring at him with the cigarette barely hanging on and the night silent between them but noisy everywhere else. The lapping of the pool, the distant sound of traffic, insects chirring somewhere in the gardens to the side. And he says nothing more, just looks everywhere but at her with his throat working hard to keep swallowing down whatever regrets he’s feeling.

“Why?” she asks finally. The cigarette falls from her mouth, bouncing off her knee and vanishing into the brush. She lets it vanish.

“Because,” he replies, still not looking at her, “this job, it’s… demeaning, in a way. I’m not good at it. I’m not good at being normal or hiding the parts of me people are uncomfortable around. I despise people I don’t know touching me, and I don’t have the social skills I need to extract myself from excruciating situations without causing offense. I’m paid to be pretty and conversational, but not _too_ conversational. A centrepiece. I’m to make the person on my arm look better without drawing attention away from them, and I don’t know…” He stops, taking a shuddering breath that hurts her just as much as it must hurt him. “The only clients I’m able to reliably retain are the ones who view me sexually as some kind of challenge to overcome or seduce or corrupt, and you.”

This is dangerous ground and she treads judiciously, well aware that he’s feeling raw and ill-used right now, and angry also, likely. “I’ve never made a secret of the fact I find you sexually attractive,” she says carefully. “But you’re not a conquest to me. That’s not why I hire you. And I still don’t understand how this relates to my kissing you—”

“That’s _exactly_ why I want you to kiss me,” he snaps. “Other people _take,_ they just take what they want because I’m a product they’ve paid for, not a man with my own thoughts and desires and wishes. I’ve been degraded, insulted, propositioned—” She winces at that, but his ire doesn’t seem aimed at her, for some reason, despite having absolutely been guilty of that last one: “—and I’m not a _prostitute,_ but that doesn’t stop some of them from trying to get me drunk and shove their tongues down my throat and… you don’t. Do that. Any of it, really, because, even when you try to lure me into your bed, it’s because I’m a human being you desire intimacy with, not because I’m a product you can do with what you please. It’s _flattering,_ not dehumanising. And I need that. I just… I need it. And, if I’m being completely honest, also because I’ve never had anyone who was _good_ at kissing kiss me and that doesn’t bode well for my future dating prospects.”

He’s on the only chair out here; she’s sitting with her legs dangling over the small ridge down to the pool, looking sideways at him. And there’s something furiously real about him at that moment, something hungrier than she knows. She thinks that maybe sure she’s lonely, but not quite in the same way that he is.

So she stands, walking over to him and pausing before him, looking down at the shy way he glances up through his damp bangs. They hang over his eyes, beginning to dry in clumps in the warm air. The ends still dripping gently, beads of water catching the light from above, the one that moths are battering themselves against wrathfully.

“Don’t internalise the way they treat you,” she says, unsure of why she’s giving him life advice when she barely has her shit together as it is. “You’re worth more than your capacity for sex. Those parts you think you need to hide? They’re the important parts. You should flaunt them and tell the people who don’t appreciate them to go fuck themselves instead.”

Still looking up at her, perched nervously on his chair like he’s not sure whether to stand or stay seated, his mouth twitches before he replies, turning downward at an angle she hates. “If my only real friend, a friend being someone I can speak openly to, is a woman who pays me occasionally to pretend to like her—honestly, considering that, it does put into question my inherent value.”

That earns a snort from her, unladylike but, shit, she’s not at her mom’s. “Bull. You do like me, there’s no pretending. You wouldn’t let me touch you so freely if you didn’t like me, despite how uncomfortable you feel with it when it’s others doing the touching.”

“Well,” he begins, but she cuts him off by bowing down, one hand on the arm of the chair to keep her balance, and shutting him up with her mouth over his. They’re not touching except for the point of contact between their lips and, for a second, all she can think is ‘yeah, he’s really not a good kisser.’

They pull apart a little, Robert looking stressed and tense, but she dips and kisses his wary mouth again quickly. “Relax,” she murmurs. “Follow my lead, like this.” This time, she’s slower. Broadcasting her movements as she slots their lips together and presses close, applying the slightest pressure to his bottom lip until his mouth goes from stiff to yielding. As soon as she feels that small give, the thrum of _feeling_ that shivers through her from him, she lets her mouth open a touch, tongue brushing against his lip in a curious trace. He lets her in with a soft huff of air and suddenly they’re kissing fiercely and fast, his hands darting up to rest awkwardly on her hips and her back aching as she bows down into him.

It’s his turn to pull back a little, looking flushed and dazed. “I don’t know what to do with my hands,” he admits, glancing down. “I don’t know where to put them.”

“Wherever you want,” she tells him. “Wherever your body is telling you to. Don’t listen to your brain, it overthinks things—and if this is the only nice kiss you’re going to get for a while, you might as well live it up a little. Tell me what you want.”

He laughs gently at that, an awed kind of laugh, before tilting his head back in an unconscious request for her mouth to return to his. She obeys, mostly because fuck he feels nice when he starts responding to her mouth and it’s been forever since she’s kissed someone so receptive. When his hands return, they’re shy and cautious, fluttering against her sides before settling again on her hips and pulling her closer, knees knocking against his and back twinging again from the extreme angle she’s at. Maybe she flinches or makes a soft noise of pain against his mouth, because he pulls back and glances down between them. Him being a male, she’d assume he’s looking at her tits which aren’t exactly contained nicely at this angle in the bikini top she’s wearing, but he proves that assumption wrong almost immediately.

His hand shifts around to her back, just above her ass, and he slide back on the chair with his eyes widening like he’s already shocked he’s being so forward. “Here,” he stammers out, now pink right down to his chest as his embarrassment pools. “Uh, sit, I guess, um… your back…”

It’s such a shy, nervous request that she’s not sure he’s really thought it through but doesn’t question him further. For the first time all night, he’s not looking sad or morosely ruminating on all his supposed flaws, and she’s calling that a win. Sliding onto the chair with her legs folded on either side of him, she settles into his lap without lowering her weight onto him, hands smoothing up his bare chest, over the small nubs of his stiffened nipples—whether he’s cold or aroused is anyone’s guess, although she expects it’s the latter since he’s nineteen and probably still hormonal as hell and she’s now straddling him in just a bikini set—and up to cup his cheeks as she dips back in and kisses him in a way that’s going to ensure any person following _this_ has a high bar to vault. Emily’s always taken pride in being the best at what she does, and it gives her no small pleasure to think that she’s going to be the person he thinks of and compares any following kisses to, right up until he meets the person who wipes her completely from his mind.

Shit, she could die tomorrow and he’ll still carry this moment, her kisses, and that’s a heady, realised feeling.

Sitting like this, with all the power over each other’s bodies that it gives them and with his open allowance to explore her, they’re teetering on the line of no longer just kissing. It’s a line she dances with, making sure to keep drawing him up into her as she nips at his lip and follows up with her tongue flicking against his teeth. Hands sliding down to coil around his side and curl in, nails gently skating his skin, she breathes him in sharply and feels him gasp at the sensation of being pulled, wanted, desired. No one kisses like this unless they’re really into the person they’re kissing, with this fierceness that’s impossible not to return, the same hunger she’d seen in his eyes before. Below her, he twists up in the chair, bucking into her as he obeys her wordless teasing and rises splendidly to the challenge she’s set him. She’d bet that, if he had the breath to spare, he’d have moaned at that moment.

As though to cement this supposition, when he breaks away to breathe and collapses back down into the chair with his hands still locked around her waist and his eyes popped wide, mouth bitten-pink and hazel irises vivid around how dark and round his pupils are, she falls with him and finds that—once she’s curled down against his thudding body with his rapid heartbeat hammering into her—he’s hard against her thigh.

Despite wanting nothing more than to reach down and goad him to madness with her hand and that firm line throbbing hot against her, she closes her eyes and tries to regain her sanity.

“You told me to tell you want I want,” he breathes with that same shocked arousal in his voice. She opens her eyes and looks at him, feeling the heat that slams through her to twist hungrily between her legs somehow transmit into him as his cock jerks against her. “I want, uh, I want…”

“I know,” she manages, her own words working about as well as his are. Despite her surety that she’d remain in control, he’s shattered her. This little buck, ten years younger than her and without a shred of her experience, he’s shattered every one of her illusions about how much control she has over her own desires. “We shouldn’t have sex though.”

She hates being smart about things. If she was dumb, this night could be glorious. God knows, her entire body is buzzing a line right to her cunt telling her to ignore her brain and take what she knows he’s worked up enough to freely offer. But that hadn’t been what he’d asked for. He’d asked for a kiss, not sex, and she used to be nineteen too: at that age, once she’d gotten worked up and turned on, she’d have fucked almost anything just to relieve the tantamount pressure, whether or not it was a good idea.

He makes a low, groaning noise under her, shifting and tensing right from his fixed expression down to his toes when that has the unforeseen side-effect of rubbing him tight against her. “It’s not a whim,” he says, giving her that same blown-pupil look she’d given the first guy to press her buttons in all the right ways. The same ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me but I want more’ stare. “I think about you a lot, all the time, and this, doing this, making luh-love to you.”

Because she’s not monstrous, she slips off of him and back up against the railing before she responds, watching as he stands and hovers uncertainly between them. His dick is brazenly joining the proceedings, outlined by the overhead light as a firm cotton-bound shape that, from a cursory estimation, is every bit the polite college-boy’s cock she’d expected it to be. Long to make up for its slimness and demanding nothing of her but what she’s willing to give it, just as unassuming as the rest of him.

“Your first time should be someone as pretty and promising as you are,” she says finally, thinking that he’s definitely a virgin if he’s using terms like ‘making love’ and also thinking that she’s going to need to go for another swim to calm down after this. “Not me. I’m old and cynical and angry and you’re…”

Breakable.

He doesn’t confirm whether he’s a virgin or not, but he doesn’t deny it either. Just watches her with shadowed eyes, hands stiff on his sides. “People my age don’t understand me,” he says, slamming a hard stake of cold slashing right through her arousal; while in this context it’s not predatory—he’s nineteen, he’s an adult who she suspects has been playing the adult long before his license confirmed it—she’s heard that too many times used in darker contexts. “I haven’t been engaged with my birth cohort since I was in elementary school. I can’t _connect_ to them on this level, not like I can with you—why are you looking at me like that?”

“Unfortunate choice of terminology,” she jokes gently, intending not to expand on that—but he gets her instantly.

His mouth thins a little. “You’re an FBI agent, I… forgot. In the, uh, excitement. Sex crimes, I’m guessing? I’m not a child, Emily, and I’ve never been a victim. Don’t bring your work here—it has no place between us.”

“You don’t—”

But he cuts her off with a fast, “If we’d had sex just then, would you have still paid me for the night? Answer honestly.”

She does: “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t have accepted it. You’re not a prostitute and, if we’d had sex, this would no longer be a business relationship. It would be personal. Why is this important?” He shrugs, slouching back against the wall. He’s no longer hard, the flush on his chest and throat receding. He doesn’t explain himself, just looks tired once more. She lets him drop it, since he’s clearly inclined to. “My turn for a question. If we’d had sex, would you have told me your name?”

That earns a barked laugh, and he looks at her like she’s delighted him, pulled him out of whatever drain he’d been circling with her rejection of him. “No,” he says, unsurprisingly.

“What, you’ll fuck me but not tell me your name? What’s with that?”

He smiles at her, standing and coming to lean on the balcony beside her, their shoulders pressed together. This time, he doesn’t flinch at the touch. “Maybe I don’t trust you,” he says.

“That’s smart,” she replies, leaning against him. “But also, you’re lucky I’m not a profiler because I could have a _field_ day with that.”

And, just like that, as he laughs and she laughs with him, the shadow over the night fades and they’re back to being how they’d been before he’d asked her to kiss him—except perhaps both a little clearer on just how exactly the other views them.


	3. 29 - 30

_Night 29. Room 17. October 31, 2000. 22:16._

She’d told Robert to show up to tonight costumed in something fun, so he’d appeared wearing his usual suit but with a hollowed-out pumpkin head under his arm. She’d dressed as a fortune-teller from an old movie, complete with sequins and floaty veils, and they’d spent the night at a Halloween meet-up helping hand candy out to kids and make sure that no one cheated at the apple barrel.

He’s quiet now, sitting on the hotel bed with his shoes off and the pumpkin on his lap, staring thoughtfully at the giant pile of left-over candy they’d been gifted. When she crawls onto the bed beside him, the candy a wall of sucrose between them, he turns that thoughtful gaze to her.

“What’s eating you?” she asks. It’s been a whirlwind few months, but he’s looking better than she’s feeling.

“Just thinking,” he replies, taking a candy bar and unwrapping it slowly, the pumpkin wobbling on his lap. “Out of everywhere we could have gone tonight, why did you pick there? It’s not the kind of place I’d picture someone like you having fun.”

“Someone like me?” She knows what he means, but it’s still funny to see him trip over himself trying to explain, panicking a little as he thinks he’s offended her.

“Just, someone so… well, you’re—no offense—clearly upper class. And adult in a way that a church Halloween fete just kind of isn’t, if you’re not a child or with your own children. It’s just not really, uh… expected.” He stumbles to a stop, blinking like he’s hoping if he does it fast enough she’ll focus on that and not his words.

“Do you really want to know why I chose the fete?” she asks after a long moment, thinking back to the time they’d played video games and then watched the movies he’d picked out, all horror of some kind with a particular focus.

“Yes.”

“Because I took a gamble that out of all the holidays, I think Halloween might be your favourite.” She smiles at his startled look, the one that starts off all surprised and then slips into an enchanted awe. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

She hopes she is. This weekend, as important as she expects it is to him, cost her more than just money. Which she doesn’t regret, but she is sore right now in a way she won’t tell him.

“You are, absolutely,” he admits, putting the pumpkin aside and turning on the bed to face her completely, legs folded under him. “That’s amazing, fantastic. I can’t even imagine how you inferred that—I assume from the horror movies back in July? But that was _months_ ago, and you retained that information! About _me.”_

“Yeah, well, I guessed it then and played the long con until tonight to confirm it.” She’s genuinely happy that she got it right but, judging from the look on his face, her smile is coming off as forced. It’s not, really, but… “So, what do I get for guessing?”

“Why are you sad?” asks Robbie sharply, the pumpkin now completely forgotten just as the candy bar in his hand is too. “What’s going on?” He pauses, eyes narrowed. “Todd?”

Damnit.

“What makes you think it’s about him?” Emily mutters, pissed off. She’d met Todd at a bar near her apartment, taking him home in a rash of irrationality probably driven by how much she resented that her dreams lately had been entirely sexual and entirely focused on one man in particular. Somehow, Todd has become a _thing_ , some weird kind of constant in her life over the past few weeks. They’re not dating, just fucking, and so she hasn’t altered her meetings with Robert nor kept Todd’s existence a secret from him—and Robert seems oddly bothered by the man.

“Because he’s an asshole,” Robert responds instantly, the smile now truly gone. “You don’t even like him.”

“I like him just _fine,”_ Emily lies.

Robert smirks a little, mouth curling tightly as he finished his candy off and reaches for another. There’s a stomach ache in his future for sure, but she’s sour enough at him for that comment that she’s sure he deserves it. Instead, she picks up a packet of powdered candy sugar and rips the top off violently.

“You only bring him up to complain,” he points out. She ignores him, tipping her head back so she can swallow the powder in one fizzy hit. “You don’t really like anything about him and I don’t think he actually likes that much about you, from what you’ve told me—”

“What?” Coughing on the powdered candy, she snaps her head down and glares at him. “What gives you that impression?”

“He never lets you speak your mind, minimises the little you’ve told him of what you do, only bothers with flattery prior to intercourse—”

To shut him and all his annoyingly correct observations up, she picks up a sucker and pops it into his open mouth, careful not to choke him. He scowls around it, but politely obeys her upspoken command and sucks instead of continuing to shred her thin hopes that her fuckbuddy isn’t a total fuck-knuckle.

She’s always had crap taste.

“How about you worry about how I’m living my life when you stop working yourself to death?” she offers. He nods, still sucking on the candy with his brow furrowing as he hits the sour centre. “But okay, fine, yes it’s about Todd. He wanted to come over tonight and I said no because I wanted to spend it with you, and I _know_ how that comes off, don’t look at me like that.”

He keeps looking at her like that, the stick bobbing around in his mouth as he rearranges its position with his tongue: his expression screams ‘you blew him off to hang with an escort and you’re pissed off at _him?’_

Or maybe she’s projecting a bit. He could just be thinking ‘fuck this is sour and I have to tough it out so I don’t lose face’, which is likely judging by his pursed lips.

“Anyway,” she finishes, feeling weirdly off-course, “I don’t think he’s coming back because I might, maybe, have made a small comment about the fact that maybe if he was as good outside the sack as he is in it then maybe people would want to spend time around him with clothes on. Don’t _look_ at me like that, he was being an ass!”

Robert just continues sucking on his candy, stick waggling and his eyebrows raised.

“You’re right,” she realises with a groan. “I’m a total bitch, oh god.”

There’s a loud _cronch_ as he bites the candy in half off the stick, chewing busily before reaching up to remove the now candy-less stick. She winces for his teeth.

“If it helps, I blew off a meeting with my dissertation advisor to be here,” he says, licking his lips to remove the traces of sugar on them. She’s distracted for a second by the pink flick of his tongue, before realising what he’s said with a thrum of shock.

“Dissertation?” she asks.

He freezes.

“ _Doctoral_ dissertation?”

Silence. He’s not moving, not even to breathe, and she wonders why he’s so frightened until it clicks: he’s twenty as of something like three days ago—she has a present for him in her bag she hasn’t given him yet. Twenty and working on his doctorate in DC: that’s more than enough information for her to find his real identity.

“I’m not going to look you up,” she says quietly, pushing the candy aside so she can slide closer to him and touch his hand. A year they’ve been doing this now, meeting sometimes as much as twice as week. Sometimes, now, he doesn’t even take the money she leaves for him. More often than not he doesn’t, and she knows that’s probably because he’s assuming she’s financially dependant on her job at the FBI and worried that she’s hurting her assets to hire him. She’s not, but he couldn’t possibly know that. “Rob, I promise you that. You can talk about your studies—I’m not going to use it to find you. I only want to know your name if _you_ tell me it.”

There’s a long, wary moment between them that he breaks with something she later realises is a show of trust she almost can’t fathom.

“It’s my second,” he says, his voice hoarse. She frowns, confused, and he clarifies. “My second dissertation. I defended my first earlier this year, when we couldn’t meet that time. I also have four BAs, so far.”

She has no idea how to respond to this.

Finally, she manages, “So you’re some kind of genius or something?” and hopes her smile isn’t too stunned.

He shrugs, picking through the candy as he looks for the most garishly sugary one there. “Or something,” he answers. He’s watching her through his lashes as he pokes around the sugar-wall, a coy, private glance she knows is him fighting against his desire not to trust her and, apparently, losing. “I have an IQ of 186 and an eidetic memory. As far as intelligence is quantifiable, I’m well into the 99th percentile.”

“Yeah, to about thirteen fucking decimal points,” she splutters, completely stunned by his casual recitation of what she recognises is something he’s grown weary of explaining to people. “If you’re that smart, why the fuck are you here in this hotel room being paid by me to eat candy?”

“I don’t know. Why _am_ I here in your hotel room being paid to eat candy?”

His stare isn’t coy anymore and she feels pinned by it.

“Don’t turn this back on me,” she warns him, kneeling on the bed with her knees digging in hard enough into the bedding that the candy wall loses structural integrity and begins to slide towards her. He lets it go. “You exhaust yourself to do this job, we know that. Why on earth would you be overstretching yourself so much while… _oh_ , hmm.”

His eyes narrow. Emily shuffles closer, studying him intently.

“What?” he asks finally, clearly frustrated by her resolved silence. “Oh what?”

“You’re studying so many degrees for a reason.”

“Obviously. I like learning. Academia is—”

“Bullshit.” She smirks at his stunned look, lobbing another piece of candy at him to keep him quiet just long enough for her to puzzle this through. “You’re not doing it because you like learning—someone like you, you could learn anywhere _while_ earning enough to live on plus whatever extra expenses have got you coming here every week. You’re overworking yourself through studying because you’re trying to _prove_ something, probably to a parent I’d guess if you’re anything like me. Or you’re trying to reassure of yourself of your own worth through the only part of yourself that you believe has value, your intelligence.”

There’s a quiet lull, the candy untouched in his hands. Finally, he speaks in a muted voice. “What makes you think the only concept of myself I value is my intelligence?”

“Because it’s the part you were most eager to hide from me until now. You’re protecting it… we only protect so fiercely what we’re too scared to lose. If you’re insecure in it, you wouldn’t want me challenging it—I bet a small part of you loves the way you can step back from academia when you’re being Robert, because it’s the safest you ever are.”

“You think I’m escorting because I need to fracture my identity into my real persona and Robert?” He laughs a little at that, a bit of the irritation on his expression lifting. “That’s almost Freudian.”

“Oh no, that’s just a pleasant side effect. I think you’re escorting because you desperately need the money for something more important than you. You think very little of yourself, Robbie. I don’t think you’d work this hard if it was just for you. Have you given into a client’s goading yet? If you say yes, then I know I’m right. You don’t want sex with them—but you do want whoever you’re earning money for to be safe, even if that means you fuck someone to make it happen.”

The last remark she regrets as soon as saying it, seeing him wince and flinch back. The memory of the night they’d kissed is loud in the room, refusing to let either of them back away from this moment.

“Wife or girlfriend?” she presses, because she’s never learned when to quit. “Or boyfriend—sibling? Medical bills, I’m guessing. God bless America.”

“You’re slipping,” he responds. “Wild guesswork isn’t flattering. Neither is the implication that you can so accurately deduce my flaws because you yourself share them. We’re the best at seeing ourselves in others, you know. I’ve never met anyone so able to segment herself to prove a point—isn’t it shattering having so many different aspects of your life so completely separate?”

She stares at him. He stares right back, having accepted her challenge and risen beautifully to it.

“I have no idea what you’re trying to insinuate—”

“That your work is a completely different part of you than the self you show to your mother which is turn is absolutely separate from what you show Todd. Does he even know where you work?”

She’s silent as he unwraps his candy with a quick twist of his fingers and pops it into his mouth, talking around it with a smug kind of ‘gotcha’.

“Does your mother know about him?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Do your friends know about him? Incidentally, do your friends know about your mother? About me? Do you talk with your college friends about the friends you have now, or vice versa? Or is college Emily another of those fragmented compartments of your self that you’ve drawn a thick line between? Where do I sit? Am I in the part dedicated to your mother, where everything you do is to prove a point that you’re exactly as disappointing as she’s always incorrectly assumed? It doesn’t feel like you’re using me to prove a point anymore, so I can only assume I’ve graduated to my own private little section of your disjointed life, new walls around me as you portion yet another part of yourself into whatever sordid hotel—”

“I’m sorry,” Emily says.

He stops. “For what?”

But she’d heard it in his voice and she can see it in his eyes: she’s upset him.

“I’ve clearly hurt your feelings and I expect it was asking you about whether you’ve slept with a client yet. I’m sorry. And you’re right, probably. About all that.”

He doesn’t even know the half of it but, what he has, is miserably accurate.

“I’m sorry too. I lashed out. That was unnecessary and cruel.” Standing, he collects his empty wrappers and carries them across to the trash before returning for his shoes and pumpkin-head. He’s going to leave. She’s crossed a line and he’s going to leave, and she doesn’t know if he’s coming back.

It’s unexpectedly worrying not to know for sure and she stays seated on the bed, suddenly flushing hot with anxiety and uncomfortably sweaty despite the cool air of the room. She doesn’t say anything: she refuses to beg him to stay.

But he doesn’t just leave. He pauses beside her and murmurs, “Emily,” waiting for her to look up at him before bending towards her. His lips brush her temple, a butterfly-light touch, and he adds, “Goodnight,” before smiling against her skin and touching his lips to her again despite how clammy she now is.

She’s stunned by the tenderness of the gesture, the kindness behind it.

She’s not used to kind.

“Goodnight,” he says to her before leaving. He doesn’t take his money, the discrete envelope on the bedside table still there come morning.

“Goodnight,” she responds eventually to the empty room, realising she hadn’t even asked for his name.

 

_Night 30. Room 301. January 12, 2001. 18:00._

The next time they meet is in the dead of winter, months later, and it’s her fault it took so long, not his. The whole day she spends in an anxious kind of waiting, checking and double-checking the confirmation text on her cell indicating the time they’re due to meet. Just in case she hallucinated his acquiesce and he’s not coming after all, or if she’s mixed up the dates or times or—

There’s a knock at the door dead on six o’clock and she shivers along with every rap of his knuckles. When she opens it to find him standing there dressed as nicely as ever despite her ticking ‘casual attire’, it takes approximately ten seconds for him to go from smiling shyly in greeting to frowning as he notices how frazzled she is.

“Hi, come in, hello,” she rambles, yanking the door open and darting back into the room. “I ordered pizza, although it’s not here yet, and there’s wine I guess you’re probably not supposed to drink but I won’t tell if you don’t—”

“Emily?” Robert asks, closing the door gently behind him and catching her hand. “Slow down, hey. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she lies. “I’ve just missed you a lot. I promise I wasn’t avoiding you—work was… work. You know how it can be.” She smiles brightly, but he doesn’t seem fooled. “Anyway, I didn’t have a Christmas so, here you are. Want to have a late Christmas with me? I have shitty holiday movies and clearance crackers—”

“Why are you limping?”

Damn.

“Pulled a muscle,” she lies again, trying to continue smiling despite how much she fucking hurts right now. “Over-trained at work. Anyway—”

But he’s on her, reaching for her hand to stop her dodging away and frowning as he looks her up and down. She can’t help it—she’s shaken enough still that when he looms, she twists away to hide the way she flinches back, her fists balling a little along with the sharp jerk of pain that slams up her arm from where his fingers hold her. Fight and flight all at once.

He sees it all.

“You’re hurt!” he exclaims, eyes widening with horror. “How did you get hurt? When? Are you okay?”

“It’s a few bruises,” she lies. “Some muscle aches and bruises, seriously, nothing to worry your pretty face about.” When he does nothing but stare at her with an accusing kind of hurt on his features, she bristles. “Stop looking at me like that! We’re not discussing this and there’s nothing you can do to make me!”

About that, as it turns out, she’s very, very wrong.

 

_Night 30. Room 301. January 12, 2001. 21:28._

He’s ridiculously persuasive.

Begrudgingly, she finally lets him talk her into laying down and that’s where they are now, lying in the quiet of the night as the TV plays a holiday movie in a soft undertone to his worried eyes on her. He’d watched in silence as she’d swallowed two painkillers washed down with another glass of wine before taking both things from her and reading the label with focused disapproval. But any sass he’d given her about it she’d given right back.

Until now. The painkillers have kicked in hard and she’s dozy and weird as it mixes with the wine, brain slurring from one thought to the next and very aware of his weight dipping the bed beside her. His hand is on her arm. Fingers tracing her skin as he absentmindedly strokes her, almost like he doesn’t know what his hand is doing. She tries to turn to study them more closely, disinterested with the movie, and gasps a little as a dull throb of pain hums through her abdomen.

“You’re not going to tell me how you got hurt, are you?” he asks distantly. She rolls her eyes at him but doesn’t answer, words feeling a little too clumsy for her to manage right now. “At least I know you had medical attention… your medication is prescription. I don’t understand why you won’t let me help you.”

“Your face is prescription,” she manages, reaching out and catching his hand and using it to inch closer to him, ignoring the pain to lever herself up and study him closely. “You know, sex is a proven pain-reliever, if you really want to help so bad.”

The sensible part of her brain kicks the stoned part of it as she says this, seeing him sigh.

But he shocks her.

“Lay back,” says Robert, sitting up onto his knees and switching the side lamp on, her narrowing her eyes against the glare. “You want me to touch you?”

Said like that, with that look in his eyes, she absolutely fucking does, but she’s too shocked by his apparent agreement to respond. Her brain chugs over it, bottlenecking on the ‘why now’ thought, since she’s notably drunk with the painkillers adding an extra layer of dazedness.

He ignores her silence, leaning on his elbow and lowering himself to kiss her forehead gently, his eyes so wide and worried that she’s stuck on them, staring blankly at him as another whirl of dizzy knocks her back.

“Let me see where you’re hurt,” he whispers against her skin, pulling back a little and watching her closely. “You don’t need to do anything, I just want to see. I don’t like not knowing.”

Even as he says this, he gestures to her buttoned pyjama shirt with a questioning air. She nods, watching him slowly unbutton her shirt, peeling it and the tank below back in order to examine the skin revealed which, in the yellowed light of the lamp, is a spectacular rainbow of fresh bruising arcing up to where her cracked rib is strapped. His fingers touch the mottled colouration with a butterfly’s weight, his mouth forming a shocked _oh_ of horror and misery.

“Promise me this was at work,” he whispers, staring at it still. “Promise me someone you love didn’t do this to you.”

“It was work,” she says, fascinated with his open fear for her. No one fears for her. No one worries for her like this… it’s appealing in a disconcerting kind of way. “Perp got the best of me. Knocked me down…” She touches her fingers to the side of her skull, his coming up to trace along until he finds the goose egg under there from the whacking she’d gotten. “… kicked the shit out of me before my partner got there.”

“You could have been killed. What if he’d been armed? Head injuries are a common cause of death, that _alone_ could have killed you. And you’re mixing alcohol and painkillers while recovering from a head wound? Emily!”

There’s something appealing also about his absolute dismay right now; even sober, she’d have had trouble piecing together why he’s so bothered. So what if her work kills her? Dying happens. People die. That’s what people do.

“I don’t care,” she snaps, closing her eyes and focusing instead on his aggravated breathing and the returned touch of his hand to her torso, tracing the lines of the bruise like he’s imagining every blow. That hand continues down, down, until he’s following the shape of what she knows is a nasty graze that cuts right down under the waistband of her pants and down her outer thigh, where she’d been ground into the asphalt.

“I care,” he says in a voice so soft she might have dreamed it. “I care so much. Why can’t you see that?”

Instead of answering what she’s sure is a question that doesn’t need an answer because it should be obvious to him, she rolls her eyes and struggles up. Looking at him now, she can see that breakable-air to him again, all his soft parts bared and vulnerable. She could hurt him now.

She doesn’t. She warns him.

“Why treasure life so much?” she snarls, shoving his hands aside and struggling to wiggle her loose pants down without tearing at her raw skin. “ _This_ is what life is, Robert. It’s nothing but pain and bleeding and bruising.”

He stares at the flesh revealed, patterned oddly in the lamplight. She kicks her pants off, panting hard as she kneels on the bed in front of him in nothing below the waist but her underwear. All down her hip, her thigh, more bruising. More torn skin. More parts of her broken. It’s what the work is—it’s what _life_ is, and he needs to build walls against that.

Like she has.

“Not pretty, is it?” she says, watching him lean closer to study what had been just hours ago more clearly the outline of a boot, now darkening and blurring.

“I refuse to subscribe to the outlook that this is normal,” he says finally, looking up at her with an intent kind of fury in his gaze that rocks her. “This is an outlier. You work a dangerous job and this is the outcome. I assume in the process of receiving this pain, you saved a life. You’ve saved lots, I’d bet. Isn’t that something powerful? Your pain now means that someone out there who could have hurt later now won’t, because the person who would have hurt them—the person whose boot caused _this_ —is now where he can’t hurt anyone for some considerable amount of time. So why do you focus on the pain of this moment, instead of what could be seen as awe-inspiring and strong?”

“For one, because I’m the one feeling it, jackass. It’s hard to be philosophical when it’s your body bruised to fuck and back.” She’s annoyed at him and it shows, even as she wavers and turns to try and spot the painkillers he’s hidden from her.

“Lay down,” he tells her.

She doesn’t.

“Lay _down_ ,” he says again, looking like he wants to make her but can’t bear the thought of forcing her down. She bets he would though, if she pushed him. She bets he’s like every other boot, just waiting for the chance to use bruising force against her because she dares to be stubborn.

“Going to make me?” she snaps, hearing something in her voice that she hates. It’s not fierceness or mocking or derision—in her voice, deep down, she can hear a heartbreaking expectation of hurt. “Go on. Shove me, then. What’s one more bruise?”

And now he’s looking at her like she’s kicked him, like she’s unzipped him open and scooped everything out.

“I’d never hurt you?”

It’s worded like a question, the upward inflection at the end tilted sharply like it contains all his shock that she’d think that of him.

She closes her eyes, doesn’t lie down, and waits for him to be proven wrong.

“Emily…”

Despite her stubbornness, she may lose this one. Staying upright is dizzying.

A gentle hand catches her when she sways, levering her down, and she hates him for this. Hates every asshole like him, every—

He’s undoing the rest of her pyjama top. Her eyes snap open, hand jerking up to stall his fingers on her buttons as she eyes him warily. Something silent passes between them then, some indication that he’s doing this for a reason… and her hand drops. She watches with numb resignation as he undoes her shirt, helping her sit up just a bit to pull it off—being so very careful with her rib and her bruises that she’s almost sorry for her doubt. Her tank top follows, until she’s sitting in an athletic bra and her underwear and it’s the least sexy moment of her life, because he’s found what he’s looking for. His long fingers touching her shoulders, tracing the bruises there. The old bruises, yellowed and sore. More on her upper arms.

“I didn’t tell him not to do it,” she says. It’s not entirely a lie, and it’s probably mystifying to Robert. The boy’s a virgin. She doubts he knows what bruises caused by hands pinning her down look like—

“I don’t doubt that,” he says quietly. “But I do doubt it was for any healthy reason. Do you like being pinned down? Is that sexually arousing for you?”

She swallows around the weird tension of this moment, the odd thought that he’s probably never seen a woman as undressed as she is right now before but there’s nothing sexual at all in his touch despite his frank questioning.

Maybe that’s why she’s honest.

“I hate it,” she admits.

“Did you tell him that?”

No.

He touches the bruises again, something sad settling deep into him and visibly making him seem older to her eyes, like this night has aged him somehow. “He shouldn’t have left bruises like these. They’re deep enough that they would have hurt tremendously when he was leaving them… I hate what this says about you.”

“That I’m easy?”

But he shakes his head, leaning down to brush his lips against them so carefully that she’s left breathless, watching him work from one old bruise to another, like he’s working to reclaim the space. To give her back the skin Todd had taken when he’d dug his fingers deep and made her feel like nothing but something he wanted to fuck and that was it.

“That you don’t love yourself enough to protect yourself,” he says finally, sliding down into the covers as he lowers himself to her abdomen and, shockingly, repeats the process there. Brushing his lips so gently against the bruised skin that she can’t do anything but breathe slowly through it, a soft gasp slipping loose that she doesn’t mean to voice. “And I wish I could change that, because your continued survival is proving integral to my sustained happiness. I don’t want to wake up one day to a world where I never see you again, and all because I failed to show you how important you are to me.”

Head-aching and dangerously close to tapping out of a conversation she knows is important in a way she can’t fathom right now but also will likely not remember tomorrow, Emily just reels under the weight of this. It’s unprecedented. Her? Important?

She wants to believe him, even as he finishes reclaiming her body for herself and slips back up to lie beside her, hand stroking her unbruised side in a soft, even rhythm.

She kisses him. It’s as soft as he’s turned out to be, just two people connecting gently at one point of contact, his hand coming to her cheek as he cradles her close and lets her press into him, breathing him. Kissing back, and she amends her prior thought that he’s bad at this: he kisses in a way that’s as beautiful as the way his mind works is. As soft and delicate as the way he articulates the way the world works for him… as carefully as though she’s as important as he’s trying to make her feel.

“Stay with me tonight,” she asks, dangerously close to begging. “ _With_ me. In this bed. I don’t want to wake alone, thinking of them above me…”

Or Todd, she thinks but doesn’t say.

“Todd,” he murmurs against her skin.

“Do you really think I kept him around after that night?” Emily smiles a little weakly at his shocked/pleased look. “I might let them degrade me in the moment, but I do retain some sense of self-worth, however thin. He’s gone, Rob. Until the next asshole. They’re all assholes eventually.”

“I believe you’ll see otherwise one day,” he states quietly. “I’ll stay. You won’t be alone.”

“Thank you,” she says, burrowing as tight to him as she can manage without screaming at his warmth on her raw body and closing her eyes.

Sleep is a long time coming, but it does come.

 

_Night 30. Room 301. January 13, 2001. 03:32._

She wakes at some godawful hour of the night uncomfortable with the bra she’s still, somehow, wearing. She’s feeling swollen and sore and doesn’t even think to warn him before she slips it over her head and tosses it aside, the bed rustling under her movements. She thinks he’s asleep but, when she looks at him in the dim light from the bathroom light someone has left on, his eyes are open and watching her.

He doesn’t say anything, despite the eyeful of her tits he’s getting right now. And she’s sober and headachy but pretty sure they’d crossed some kind of emotional line last night, which is maybe why she doesn’t really care all that much that he’s seen so much of her. Her mind is so more private than her body is anyway, and he seems to have slipped into that despite her.

Neither of them speak as she slips back into the covers with him, joining him on his pillow and studying him closely. He’s dressed still, which she’s sure is as uncomfortable for him as it had been for her. Without speaking still, she silently undoes his shirt buttons.

He doesn’t stop her. Eventually, he helps her slide it from his shoulders. There’s no noise but distant traffic and the blankets below them. Even through the pain of her body, Emily’s wired. As she reaches to his pants and slowly undoes the button, seeing his eyes flicker shut and stay like that for a second like he’s remembering how to breathe, she’s doing much the same. Reminding herself that this isn’t going to lead to sex. It’s not.

It feels like it is though, the moment so erotically charged that the ache of her nipples brushing the covers when they move against her is just another discomfort to add.

He doesn’t say a word as he slips his pants off, the act only feeling right at this early hour of the morning. His movements are sleepy despite the clarity in his wide eyes.

When her fingers curl around his waistband, his settle upon them.

“Em…?” he says, his voice so husky and deep she’s wet just hearing it.

“No sex unless you want it,” she promises. “I won’t touch you unless you want to be touched. I won’t ask you to touch me when you’ve indicated discomfort. But you’re welcome to. And I’m very sober now.”

His fingers flit away and she slides his briefs down slowly, feeling them catch on his stiffening cock. But she said she wouldn’t touch him, not sexually, so she pauses there until he wiggles around and comes to help. She can’t see, not under the covers and with the bathroom light only illuminating select parts of the room, but she feels him ease his briefs around his dick, feels how his hand lingers on himself as he kicks them the rest of the way off, other hand brushing her underwear. She obeys, and then they’re laying together with nothing between them but uncertainty.

It’s more intoxicating than the wine, knowing she’s likely the first to ever do something like this with him. And she’s careful with it, aware that this is him giving her something he’s been vocal about not wanting to share freely. Instead of pushing his boundaries, she just wraps her arm over him, nestles closer to his chest, and ignores her natural discomfort with close cuddling while sleeping to make herself comfortable. And for a while, they stay like that. His hand smoothing itself over and over down her side, petting almost. Tracing up and down and up and down, from her hip to just below the bottom of her breast, each stroke slowly teasing higher until she can practically feel him restraining himself.

She doesn’t tell him to do anything. Just inches around a bit until she can reach his hand with hers, catching it up the upstroke and bringing it slowly, just guiding, to her breast. If he wants to pull away, he can. But it’s permission if he wants something else.

He does. Where his throat is against her hair, she feels him swallow hard, hand curling curiously around her, fingers tracing the outline of her nipple. Thumb brushing the hardened nub, feeling him make a soft noise as it responds to that touch. His bare legs brush hers as he inches slightly closer. He’s warm and breathing quickly; she’s breathing just as fast, in awe of how careful he is not to bump her.

Suddenly, his hand slips from her breast and up to her face, curling around her cheek for a second. She closes her eyes, feeling his fingers trace her jaw, his thumb touching her lower lip… before turning her head to kiss it gently, pulling back so she can reach in order to nip at his fingertips. He doesn’t pull them away, a fascinated kind of rigidity to his body as she mouths at them, fighting the urge to arch against him.

“You’re making it hard to resist,” he breathes suddenly. “You have no idea, do you? How impossibly tantalising you are. I don’t want to take advantage of you, to become yet another man who hurts you, but you’re this terrifying mix of everything I find alluring in a woman and I feel intoxicated by it.”

“That’s a very pretty way to say you want to fuck me,” she teases, her breath catching hard with a lance of pain as she tries to press closer to him, her breasts against his chest, and her cracked rib screams in complaint. “Ah, ahhh…”

“Don’t move so much. You’re going to hurt yourself…”

“Can’t help it,” she hisses. “I want to be the first woman you feel naked against you.”

He obliges. She’s stunned by how much of him there is, all long limbs and warm skin, as he gently lines himself up beside her with only his hips cocked away. “Oh…” he whispers at the feel her against him, his heart hammering in his chest. “This is…”

Curious, she presses a little—she’s always been bad at self-control— “In any of those dreams you told me you have of me, have you dreamed of something like this?”

“No, not… not this real. Never this real.” He sounds so dazed that she smiles, imagining him getting drunk off all the new sensations, all this overwhelming skin-on-skin, even if neither is touching each other below the waist. He couldn’t even if she wanted him to—she does, but the grazing and stiffness is worst there exactly where his body would press against hers, and she doesn’t think he’ll be able to without causing her pain.

“God,” she groans, closing her eyes. “If I wasn’t so bruised, I’d let you grind against me until you came—” The noise he makes at that is hilariously aroused, and she smiles even as it slams deep into her. “—so you don’t need to freak out about penetration but, fuck, I don’t think I can. Fucking _assholes._ ”

“That’s still sex,” he grits out through what are obviously clenched teeth, breathing raggedly as he twists suddenly in place. His hip bumps Emily, a shock sensation of his dick against her the only thing tempering the deep throb of pain from the pressure of the touch. Despite him pulling away fast, the contact clearly accidental, she still gasps. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry.”

She moves as quickly as she can with the realisation she really needs to take a painkiller soon starting to become apparent, reaching back and grabbing a pillow to settle between their hips. He can’t smack her accidentally like this when she pulls him closer—which she does, wanting him kissing her about ten minutes ago, thank you very much—and the cool fabric against her overheated skin is as welcome as the support for her ribs is. It’s awkward, but much more comfortable, and she forgets it’s there as they kiss hungrily. As worked up as he is, Robbie’s kisses have gotten erratic, with him clearly unsure where to go from here as his body screams at him to escalate and his brain fights that, and twice she has to ease him back and slow him down as he seems to lose track of his hands and tongue.

“Let me try something,” she says finally, pulling back a little and coaxing him to tip his jaw up so she can reach his throat. Ever since she met him, she’s been fascinated by his throat, wondering if he’s one of those men who melt at the first nip of her teeth to neck.

He is.

She kisses the hollow of his throat where the collarbone dips and he makes a shocked noise and jerks against her, once again making her thank the pillow between them for saving her from a fresh reminder of her bruises. He chokes out her name, trails off into a low _ahhh_ sound, and then turns it into a moan that’s going to haunt her for the foreseeable future as she nips her way up to his jaw.

“No one’s done this to you before, have they?” she purrs into his skin before slipping her lips around his earlobe and teasing gently. Her only reply is another bitten-back moan that’s deliciously involuntary, his body shifting beside her as he obeys its wordless goading before going rigid.

“Oh, _no_ ,” he gasps suddenly, rocketing up with a sharp gasp. She jolts with surprise, staring at his shape in the gloom as he twists away from her and bows over, breathing hard with one hand steadying himself on the bed. She hears a whispered, _damn_ , and he bows lower.

“Jeez,” she breathes, realising with a thrill of titillation. “I haven’t made someone finish that fast since high school. Fuck, that’s hot.”

He turns and stares at her, looking flushed and stunned in the line of yellow light from the bathroom. “It’s _embarrassing._ I have no control…” He’s staring with a kind of rueful horror at the pillow, probably wondering how the hell they’re going to gracefully dispose of it so as to not inflict it upon housekeeping.

“It’s fantastic,” Emily says honestly, closing her eyes for a second and wondering if she can get herself off here next to him or if that’s just teasing at this point. Finishing would be great, she’s under no illusions about that, but she’s also teetering on more pain than pleasure and she could easily step back and calm down without too much frustration. “Don’t be embarrassed. If I wasn’t about to throw up from how much my ribs hurt, I’d be all over it, trust me.”

With a hurried rustle, he hurtles from the bed—embarrassment forgotten and apparently also forgetting that he’s naked—before reappearing with the wastepaper basket and kneeling on the floor beside her. “I’m sorry,” he says again, rubbing her back as she tilts over the bin and closes her eyes, nausea hitting along with the pain. “I completely forgot you were hurt in the… there’s no excuse. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she mumbles, smiling despite herself. “Considering we barely touched each other and I didn’t get off, that was some of the best action I’ve had all year. There’s something about you that’s…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but she doesn’t have to. He props the bin against her before going to get water and exactly two of her painkillers, leaving the bottle wherever he’s hidden it and watching her carefully as she swallows them.

“I know,” he says simply. “I feel it too.”

What ‘it’ is, neither of them say. Emily wonders if there are words to describe it.

She’s a little worried that verbalising the feeling will somehow make it less.

 

_Night 30. Room 301. January 13, 2001. 09:15._

She wakes in the morning to him gently leaning warmed towels against the worst of the bruising, leaning in to kiss her when her eyes open. The night before feels like a distant dream that didn’t really happen at all, but this kiss feels real. His hands on her feel real. And the warm cloth leeching pain from the deep bruising is definitely real, a pooling kind of relief beginning to spread from where it’s resting.

“Do you want me to stay a bit longer?” he asks.

“Please,” she answers, without asking him for his name.


	4. 91 - 101

_Night 91. Room 12. August 18, 2001. 00:09._

It’s getting a bit silly, honestly, how often this is happening now. It’s like at some point after that night together, these nights with the man she doesn’t know the name of have become a retreat from the stress and uncertainty of the rest of her life. When she steps into whatever hotel room they’re staying in now, it’s like she leaves the majority of Emily Prentiss piled up unceremoniously outside the door waiting for checkout—the parts of her that she retains into the room are the best parts of her. They’re the parts he’s started looking at like he’s awed by them, those barely-remembered words from when she was stoned on painkillers silently lined into his shy smiles and soft eyes around her.

It’s a little frightening to realise that she might be starting to look at him like that too. It feels too much like committing to something bigger than she understands.

Since that night, the amount of time they’ve spent together has exponentially grown. Despite the fact that she doesn’t pay him anymore—the money in the envelope beside the bed is the same money she slipped into it twenty of these nights ago, with him steadfastly ignoring it every time—and despite the fact that they don’t even bother with using the service as a go-between anymore, with her directly texting his cell, she’s beginning to think that even her budget probably can’t handle this many nights in a hotel room. But she can’t really imagine stopping.

She’s also too shy to change them, to suggest they meet at her condo, or his, that they take yet another step towards more than what they are. Taking his cell number is as far as she goes, and she never looks it up to find the name attached to the service. It’s like his anonymity confirms hers; the fact that his secrets are still hidden means hers are too, and these nights can remain delicious retreats from her diffidence.

They’re quiet tonight. He’s dressed gorgeously again, leaning against the balcony door watching her chain-smoke her way through a packet of cigarettes. She wonders what he thinks of her right now, still in the expensive dress she’d worn for the function her mother had invited them to but with bare feet and a smoke between her lips. She wonders if he’s starting to see all the cracks.

But he comes up behind her, hand trailing her bare shoulders before lifting to touch her still-pinned hair. Far from how they had been before, he loves this, touching her. There’s nothing careful about their hands on each other anymore, and no fear left in him.

“I’m sorry for tonight,” she tells him, taking the cigarette from her mouth and watching the smoke eddy a little around them in the still air. She can’t see him but his touch is comforting, and she leans back into it as he wordlessly begins to undo the elaborate bun she’s twisted her hair into. “I should have just gone alone. That was a farce.”

“I’m glad I was there,” he says finally, a cicada shrilling nearby. The heat of the night is oppressive. “I’m glad you weren’t alone.”

Her hair slips loose, cascading around her shoulders, and he runs his fingers through it to shake the tightness out. She closes her eyes. His fingers on her scalp, sore from the pins keeping it neat all night, are heavenly. It feels like he’s helping her shed the frustration of her mother’s barbed tongue, peeling the anger and the bitterness away and leaving just the parts of her she wants him to see.

It’s moments like this when she wonders why they still haven’t had sex. It feels like a moment where they could, if either was inclined. They’ve certainly come close before, not even counting the night of the painkillers. Like the night they’d been caught in the rain and she’d used his heavy coat around them both to hide the fact that she was stroking him to arousal through his pants in the taxi ride home, or the night she’d taught him how to use his fingers effectively on and in her. But, somehow, they’ve always baulked at the penetrative act.

“I miss the pool,” she announces, tearing her mind away from sex and away from her mother and back towards them. “It’s disgusting out here.”

“Smoking isn’t helping,” he comments mildly, taking the packet and frowning at it in an annoyingly contrite way. “Do you know how many quality minutes of your life you’re losing with every—”

“No, and don’t you dare tell me. I didn’t sign up for a PSA in a suit and tie.”

He eyes her now, the packet of smokes vanishing from his hand like a magic trick, sequestered somewhere on his body with the implication that she’s going to have to undress him completely to find where he’s hidden them. She’s not entirely against that.

But, instead of goading her, he tilts his chin towards the hotel room and says, “There’s a hot tub,” with a strange kind of expression on his face like he can’t even believe how daring he’s being right now.

“Robert, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she says with a laugh, grabbing his hand and leading the way.

 

_Night 91. Room 12. August 18, 2001. 01:01._

The hot-tub is smaller than warranted, which neither of them mind because it’s an excuse for her to be on his lap, teasing him relentlessly with her hands on his body and her mouth on his. She has her bikini set on; he has nothing. It’s a power-play by her, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Especially not right now, with her knees squeaking a little against the tub, the sound barely hidden by the jets as she sits up a bit and curls her body against him in a mock-representation of her riding the dick that’s trapped hard between them.

The heady look he gives her is hallowed, a kind of awe-struck wonder lighting up his features. It should be disconcerting, this open adoration, but instead it’s thrilling. Like her own personal drug-supply, knowing she can come here and find him needing and wanting her this much.

If Elizabeth’s words keep burping up into her mind and souring the moment, she does an admirable job of pretending they’re not. The sly, “Why, Emily, it’s remarkable how one of the obscenest relationships of your life has also turned out to be the most long-standing,” that had hit a nerve in both her and Robert just won’t go away, even right now.

Especially right now.

Emily falters, letting her hands drift in the water for a moment as she’s knocked off course. He seems to sense her distraction.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, leaning his head back to study her more closely. “You’ve tensed up again.”

“Mother,” she mutters, sinking back down onto him and settling in with his dick tucked neatly between her legs. His lashes flicker a little, mouth opening slightly, before he pushes up gently back against her and then goes still, waiting for her to speak further. “She gets in my head.”

“That’s evident,” he replies. “From the first moment I met you, you broadcasted your anger at her. It’s not subtle, Em.”

“Guess I resent her for fucking me up,” she says with a shrug, thinking ruefully that everything about her that she hates—her coldness, her aloofness, her inability to connect—she’s inherited from Elizabeth. “Don’t we all hate our parents a little for that?”

“I don’t,” is his response. He’s going soft between her thighs, probably because they’re bringing up their mothers while also grinding against each other like the horny teenagers they used to be, him more recently then her. “But is now the time to be discussing how we were parented?”

“Absolutely not,” she assures him, silencing them both by putting their mouths to use in other ways. It doesn’t take long, not with her trapping his cock and rocking against it rhythmically while also guiding his fingers on her clit, but all the time it takes is all the time she needs to put her anger aside, shoving it out the door with everything else she tries to ignore when she’s with him.

He gets her off hard but, by now, that’s nothing unusual for him. These days he doesn’t even have to be in the room for her to get off to him; even the idea of him inside her, or even just against her, is enough. For a virgin, he sure does constitute an alarming amount of her sexual fantasising. He simply takes up all the space in her head.

She can’t remember what life was like before him, but she can guess it was far lonelier than this.

 

_Night 91. Room 12. August 18, 2001. 01:37._

“Tell me about yourself,” he says suddenly, leaning forward in the hot-tub to smile disarmingly at her.

She stares at him until he expands on that thought.

“It was one of the first things you asked me, the first time you hired me. You wanted me to tell you about myself. Well, I think we’ve evolved far enough from that night that it would be remiss of me if I didn’t ask you the same question. I want to know about you—I’ve wanted to know about you for over a year now, but until tonight I’ve doubted you’d tell me.”

They’ve turned the jets off after refilling the tub with clean water and are now just relaxing, Robert’s knees poking up through the surface and Emily having shed her bikini after they’d made a mess of it.

“Favourite author?” he presses in the silence.

“Why do you think tonight is different from any other night?” she counters with, leaning her hand on his knee and frowning at him. They’re heads to tails now, her sitting at the opposite end of the tub to him so they can look at each other as they talk. “It’s not the first night we’ve been sexual together, so it’s not that. And it’s not the first night Mom’s been a bitch to me in front of you, so it’s not that either.”

“It’s exactly a year since the first night we kissed,” he responds with another of those strange smiles. “In the pool. I’d wondered if you knew when you hired me tonight.”

She hadn’t.

“A year, wow,” she says instead of anything more expansive, sinking into the water and realising that maybe her mom hadn’t been that far off the mark when stating that Robert was something long-lasting. And it’s an uncomfortable feeling to realise that whatever this is, this year and a few months thing with a broke kid using her to pay his way through college, it’s lasted longer than any other relationship in her life, ever.

It may also be the healthiest, in some weird way.

“Also, you didn’t get drunk tonight even though your mother was upsetting you,” he adds. “Despite prior experiences creating precedent. I think that’s important too. Why didn’t you get drunk?”

She doesn’t know why, but she answers. She doesn’t know why she does half the things she does with him.

“I don’t like the way I am around you when I’m drinking,” she admits. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Why? We’re sexually active together by most measures of the term except the most stringent and you know I’m attracted to you. Your open flirtation with me when drunk is hardly unwanted. I… while I’m glad you’re _not_ drinking tonight, since it would be as a result of an unpleasant experience and alcohol is a dangerous coping mechanism, I do wonder how it would be to have you flirt so openly with me now our dynamic has changed…”

He falters, his cheeks flaming red, and she leans forward and grins as she reads between the lines of that.

“You kinky little tease,” she teases him, seeing the red beginning to spread to his ears as his embarrassment grows. “You want me drunk so you can take advantage of me.”

“It’s hardly taking advantage. You’re very resolute about what you want.”

She laughs at that, flicking water at him just to see him scowl a bit. The ends of his hair are beginning to curl, drying in the warm air and frizzing up. He’s going to look like the bad end of a perm by the end of it, and she doesn’t warn him just because it’s funnier to see him resembling a startled poodle.

Instead, all she says is, “Vonnegut.”

He looks at her, startled. She clarifies.

“I enjoy Vonnegut,” she says. “Any of his work, really. _Cat’s Cradle_ resonates the most, if pressed.”

“I’d have thought you’d be more into _Mother Night,”_ he says after a moment, seeming to think that over. “ _Cat’s Cradle_ is one of his more divisive works. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who has listed a preference for it above all others. But I understand.”

“Do you?” She’s made curious by the thoughtful tone to this. “What’s there to understand about it? I just like it. It’s weird.”

“It’s defeatist,” he says simply. “It’s not pessimistic or realistic—in the end, despite everything we see, all those lives we’ve followed, the outcome is the sudden dissolution of every life on earth. Vonnegut highlights the humans within his stories, he flaunts their importance and their flaws and their humanity, and then in this book they reach what he depicts as an inevitable, frozen end. It’s world-weary and reductive. But there’s also this inevitability behind his work. Vonnegut writes like a puppet-master, bringing forth the inherent flaws of humanity through a series of contrived events to bring everything to an obvious and unstoppable end. This book is a prime example of that. I think it’s a book that would resonate with you at your worst, seeing as it celebrates the connections we make before ripping them apart while also depicting life as a series of chemical reactions and really nothing less. Do you see your death as so inevitable?”

What the fuck is she supposed to say to that, except to shake her head slowly?

“It’s also about loneliness,” Robert adds as an afterthought. “A lonely God creating humanity and then leaving it to ponder its purposelessness…”

“I think you’ve read a lot into my favourite book,” she tells him sternly. “Honestly, Robbie, maybe I just like it?”

He looks at her and quotes a line she knows immediately, remembering suddenly the first time she’d read it and found a terrible kind of sense in it, as a lonely nineteen-year-old sitting in her college library. “What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on earth, given the experience of the past million years?”

“Nothing,” she answers.

He touches the hand she has resting on his knee, waiting until she turns it palm-side up before threading his fingers through hers. “Defeatist,” he murmurs, eyes on their hands. “To be alive is to hope.”

Maybe he has a point.

Maybe it’s time she changed her favourite book.

 

_Night 91. Room 12. August 18, 2001. 05:42._

She’s too old for all-nighters, but here she is. Watching the sunrise dressed in nothing but a shirt she’d nabbed from the floor that she’s pretty sure is his since it hangs loose from her shoulders and clings tight around the tits, and her underwear. He’s slouched next to her, both of them invisible to onlookers behind the ivy-covered railing of the hotel balcony from their position on the floor. Bare legs tangled and him with one arm around her. The sky is a murky grey, but there are fingers of pink appearing distantly. The air is still and the dawn kind of quiet.

It’s dangerously peaceful.

He speaks first. “I find myself thinking about you as a child,” he says, head leaning close to hers and eyes locked on that lightening sky. “I was a very lonely child… sometimes, when I meet people who I resonate as strongly with as I do you, I wonder if we would have been friends as children.”

“Doubtful. I was a dreadful kid.” Perhaps there’s a little too much derision for her childhood self in her voice here, because he gives her a wary look. “Mom always tells me how terrible I was. Too loud, too bitchy, too stubborn, too cold. She said she’d never met a child with as little heart as I had.”

“I don’t believe that,” is his firm response. “No one who feels as strongly as you do could ever have been heartless, especially not as a child. Children are all heart and emotion. My mom used to tell me that children are so treasured because they’re the epitome of humanity’s soul without logic tarnishing them. Honestly, I think if she could have kept me small forever, she absolutely would have…”

“You didn’t know me.” It hurts to dissuade him of all his pretty notions about her, but Emily knows better than anyone that all she’s been in the past is disgraceful. “I hurt people. It’s what I did, I hurt my mom and my dad and anyone who dared to be my friend, not that I had many. I didn’t learn to be kind until college, trust me. I was everything my mother is without any of the self-control or political mastery. Just a sour, angry little girl lashing out at anything that got close.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while after that, just holds her hand and lives quietly beside her until the sky is more pink than grey and the sun is beginning to reveal their shadowed little hideaway.

“Mom also used to say that children are mirrors,” he says finally, looking at her for the first time since she’d spoken. There’s something so gentle, so coaxing, in his expression that she can’t help but lean closer and kiss him, just a little. A touch that’s as fleeting as a heartbeat. And when it’s over, he continues, “They reflect what they’re shown… but it’s not who they are. A toddler who is struck, strikes others, but not that doesn’t mean she’s composed of nothing but violence. Would you hate that child for her mimicry?”

“No,” replies Emily.

“Then I don’t think it’s fair that you hate yourself for yours,” he says, “because I hate the idea that you resent someone who I think I would have loved very much, had we met back then and been closer in age. We would have been spectacular friends.”

She asks him, “How do you know?”

And he replies, “I just do.”

 

_Night 92. Room 120. August 21, 2001. 17:37._

She gets a mystifying text the day after that night asking if they can meet again soon. He’s never texted her before—not _first_. It’s unprecedented. Perhaps that’s why she books a room only two days later despite needing to be at work the next morning, leaving the bureau and heading straight there with her gun still on and go bag on her shoulder.

He’s already there waiting, cross-legged on the floor of the living room with the hotel key-card beside him and several boxes sitting around him. She walks in, notes his anxious/excited expression, and wonders what the fuck is going on.

“I didn’t know how to ask you to contribute to this, so I figured I’d just…” He breathes quietly, not even standing to greet her, and opens one of the boxes to reveal what looks like photographs. “Here. My name isn’t on any of these, but… well, here. Here’s me.” And he pushes the box towards her, ignoring her stunned silence, adding a gentle, “I hope one day you’ll give me the same insight into you.”

Still armed, she walks forward and lowers herself beside him, seeing his gaze skip curiously to her weapon. But she can’t pay any more attention to his facial expressions or body language, because she’s reached into that open box and pulled forth the side of himself he’s gifted her with today.

They’re photos of him. As a child, as an infant, as a toddler, as a teenager. She finds him standing with chess trophies or sprawled on the ground surrounded by books. She finds another picture of him on a giant wooden playground, a man with tired eyes holding his hand and smiling vaguely in the direction of the camera. There’re photos of a smaller Robert trying to balance on a fence, arms thrown out for balance and the most focused expression Emily has ever seen on a seven-year-old plastered on his face. Here, he’s three and a beautiful woman has him on her knee and is showing him how to hold a phone to his ear. There, he’s twelve and dressed for Halloween as a skeleton archer. On the back of a small pony with his expression terrified, another with him holding a chess-piece shaped trophy, another with him in the cap and gown for graduating high school despite looking to be about thirteen-years-old. Hungrily, Emily devours each and every picture, seeing so many tiny shreds of the man before her in the child he had been.

When she’s done with the photos and they’re spread out in a wide arc around her, he opens the next box. In there, there are books. Novels and picture books, the title pages carefully tucked into the dust-jackets to obscure his name from her. They’re all well-loved. When she holds them loosely, they fall open into her lap, and he takes some from her and reads favourite lines out to her in the hushed beauty of this moment.

Today, she’s learned that he loves the desert he was born in—loves the wildlife he could find there, as she finds photos of him searching parks and backyards for beetles and bugs and finds a book of Wildlife of Nevada with his careful handwriting detailing the ones he’d found in every margin. She’s learned that he loves his mother, finding stories he’d written for school filled with the adventures they’d gone on together, the boy she’s fascinated by and the beautiful woman who is so often in the photos of him exploring his exciting world. She’s learned that she was right: Robert learns wherever he is. In every picture, he’s learning something. In every story, every piece of school work—even the clumsy finger-paintings she finds buried down the bottom of the box, those from pre-school—he’s exploring and learning and finding the world to be utterly entrancing.

She doubts her own parents would have kept as much of her as Robert’s have him.

She knows other things too, things that aren’t so blatant. The photos before Robert is seven are all adventurous. They’re out in the world, at libraries and adventure parks and wild trails. His father and mother are there, taking in turns to hold his hand or the camera. Post seven, she only ever sees Robert alone but he’s always looking back and smiling at the whoever is holding the camera. There were two were there had used to be three, but the third can still be felt. Emily knows what it looks like when a parent is gone—she knows the look kids get in their eyes when that third is completely out of reach.

In the photos where Robert is ten, he has that look. Suddenly, he’s not smiling quite as much in the photos. They’re all staged carefully. Him receiving an award or at some kind of convention. The few that are candid, he’s almost in them as an afterthought, and he never looks to the camera like the person holding it is important. There are some, just some, where he’s home and reading a book or building a model plane, and those are the only ones where his smile really returns.

“What happened when you were ten?” she asks, lingering over one of those photos and wishing that entranced smile from when he’d been small had lasted right up until now. She’d have liked to have seen it.

“My father left,” he answers after a long pause, a bitter kind of anger still evident in his voice. She wonders if he’s ever talked about this before; that kind of anger doesn’t sound like the kind that’s been voiced often. “My mother was sick and he left rather than try to take care of her.”

Emily hurts for this boy and his broken heart. “Where did you go?”

“I stayed. With Mom… someone had to take care of her.”

And it all clicks. Emily puts down the painting she’d been studying the childish brushstrokes of, staring now fully at Robert and finally understanding his tired eyes. “Oh. _Oh._ She’s why you’re here…”

He nods slowly, eyes locked on her.

He’s trusting her with so much right now, she’s floored.

With absolute care, she puts what he’s shown her aside and scoots over to him, curling against his side and feeling him loop his arm around her, both of them looking down on the scattered remnants of his entire life laid out in front of them. “Schizophrenia,” he rasps, her heart breaking more with every stammered word. “There’s a genetic component, you know. I’m too young for it to manifest if I’ve inherited it but… soon.”

She clings to him, to his fear and his nightmares and his broken heart. Letting him know she’s not leaving him, not right now. Not when he’s baring this much of himself to her.

“Your father is a jerk,” she says in reply, slashing right to the heart of that bitterness. “You don’t leave the person you love because they get sick. You stay by them, shit. Even if it gets hard, maybe you leave if it’s breaking you but _fuck_ , you don’t leave your kid there to deal with it. He had so many options to be more than a coward—he could have been a husband or a dad or _both_ , but he chose to run instead. That’s hateful.”

“I don’t hate him,” Robert answers.

“Don’t you? I would.” Privately, she thinks he might be wrong about this. He certainly looks like he hates him; there’s a simmering kind of fury in his eyes when he talks about him that suggests maybe the hate is layered so deeply into Robert’s understanding of his father he doesn’t even realise it’s there. “It’s no wonder you were lonely. I bet you never really got to be a kid after the day he left, did you?”

Robert hums, the sound rumbling through her from where her side is pressed to his chest. “Sometimes,” he says. “I did have one friend, Ethan.” And he points to a photo of two teenagers lounging together, books scattered between them. Emily studies the other boy, seeing a confident kind of air about him, and a comfortable friendship between the two boys pictured. “He’s still my roommate now, so I guess he’s always been a constant since I met him. He forces me to be young, often.” And he laughs a little self-consciously, but there’s a fond love there.

It’s an immeasurable weight off her shoulders that he’s not as alone as she’d feared.

“He doesn’t know about you though,” Robert says finally, frowning a little. “I don’t know why. I feel like I should tell him about you, but also… I don’t know. I don’t know what this is to tell him.”

“He doesn’t know you’re escorting?”

“No. When Mom had to… I had to put her somewhere she could be cared for, and that ate all of my savings from my college fund as well as a considerable amount of hers. I managed to make do for a while from the money from the sale of our home, but when that ran out, I didn’t know what to do aside from, well, this. And I was too ashamed to tell Ethan because it felt like I was failing in some fundamental way to think of a solution to my own problems, and he’s spent most of our adolescence saving me from myself. I couldn’t put him in the position where he felt like he needed to help me with this, so my work became a secret and, by extension, so did you. He thinks I sleep in my office at the college after working late on my research.”

Emily doesn’t know what to say to that.

“If he’s your friend, he’d want to help you,” she says despite knowing how useless a sentiment it is. Some things are just too big for friendship to help, and this is likely one of those things—no matter how great the heart. “He’d at least want to be given the option.”

“I have no desire to tell him about my escorting,” Robert answer quietly. “None. My only regret is that I can’t tell him about you. You’ve become… important.”

She wants to tell him that he’s important too. She wants to tell him how integral tonight is, how drawn to him she feels and how captivated by the child he’s introduced to her, this lonely boy who has become a lonely man who somehow perfectly encapsulates everything she finds beautiful about the world. His boundless curiosity, his intelligence, his kindness, his hope.

She wants to tell him that he’s everything she’s ever wished life consisted of; that he’s her friend and her hope and her promise of something better at the end of it all.

But she’s never been good at opening herself to others. Never.

So all she says is, “Maybe it’s better we stay like this.”

“A secret,” he says, not phrasing it like a question. She fancies he looks a little disappointed, even though he reaches out to take her hand.

“A secret,” she repeats numbly, wondering if there’s anything in her life that isn’t hidden from someone.

 

_Night 92. Room 120. August 22, 2001. 05:56._

Her alarm wakes them both that morning, her rolling over to find him blinking sleepily at her. He mumbles something about morning breath, but she kisses him anyway, enjoying how quiet and pliable he is in the early hours.

She’s brave in that moment, despite knowing that she needs to shower and get ready for work so this is no time to be starting a conversation they’ll desperately want to finish. “You’ve ruined me,” she tells him, heart hammering at how much of her belly she’s baring in this moment. Being vulnerable is anathema to her. Even this small show of it is nauseating. “I look for you beside me even when I’m waking up at home, alone.”

He blinks awake a little more, owl-eyes looking startled and bleary without his contacts in. “Incredible,” he says, seeming to puzzle that over fiercely. “I wonder…”

But he never finishes the thought. Her alarm shrills again and she kisses him once more before sliding out of bed and vanishing to the shower.

 

_Night 100. Room 302. October 28, 2001. 18:15._

When she asks him what he’s doing for his twenty-first and he responds ‘nothing’, her immediate reaction is glee. Her second reaction, once the glee has faded, is to book the first ever room in the first ever hotel that they’d met each other in, all that time ago.

He arrives bang on time with a wide, silly grin just for her and kissing her as soon as she opens the door, swooping in to whirl her around with her feet off the ground and her hand on his back the only thing steadying her. It’s a giddy, vivid moment, and she can’t help but laugh at his enthusiasm.

“Having a good birthday then, are you?” she asks him, earning a happy series of nods in return. “Well, happy birthday, Robbie-my-lad—here’s your present.”

It’s nothing special, just a bunch of classic horror books in lovely new hardback reprints, but he’s so excited about them that she feels like she did good anyway, especially when he gives her a rousing rendition of several Poe stories from his favourite of the texts, complete with voices.

Her other present is this: she’s got enough wine here to put even her on her ass, let alone him. And, after an amused glance at her as she brandishes the corkscrew, he agrees to take her on.

They’re both very aware what’s going to happen next.

 

_Night 100. Room 302. October 28, 2001. 23:38._

She teaches him to dance to _What I Like About You,_ swinging him around the room with no thought for his poor head on the wine they’ve hammered down. He’s exactly how she’d hoped he’d be with alcohol in him stripping away all his neuroticisms: just as sweet and silly as she’d imagined he’d be. He’s affectionate too, all wide hands and happy smiles, kissing her whenever she pauses to catch her breath.

She’s turned the thermostat up against the chill outside, but that only means that they’ve heated up fast as they’ve danced about, shedding clothes quickly until she’s pretty sure they’re just tantalising each other at this point. She doesn’t really need to lose her tank top or bra, but she does, his eyes lingering on her breasts with a happy kind of focus.

“Like what you see?” she coaxes him, gesturing him over and away from the stereo pumping music at a moderate level into the hotel room. He comes when called, brushing a finger over her nipple before bowing to brush his lips against hers. He tastes like wine, swaying a little against her before sliding his hands around her hips and lifting her up against him.

“I like you very much,” he murmurs into her mouth, tongue teasing at her lips. “I like all of you. Your smile and your nose—” She raises an eyebrow at that, but he seems sincere. “Everything about you is so, so wonderful…” And, as he’s talking, he’s undoing her pants and slipping them down her hips, expression cunning. “ _Everything._ ”

“I thought you wanted me to flirt with you?” she points out, helping him along despite her teasing.

“I did,” he says. His eyes are bright, his cheeks brighter, and she leads him over to the wine again and shares a glass with him, careful not to overdo it. Neither of them is all that interested in continuing to drink anymore now that they’ve managed to get the other’s pants off, although he takes a delicious kind of care in tasting the wine left over on her lips. “I do. But now I’m here, all I want is you.”

“Tease,” she breathes, arching against him and running her fingers through his hair. “Well, here I am, and here you are, and you have no idea about the things I dream about doing to you.”

His eyes go wide at that.

“All you have to do is tempt me,” she says to him, sliding her hand between them and running a teasing thumb along his dick.

He does.

 

_Night 100. Room 302. October 29, 2001. 00:00._

Midnight finds them in the shower together, with his hands in her hair and his cock in her mouth.

The fact that his eyes go so wide when she swallows him down for the first time, his dick all wet with the slight tinge of salt to the back of her tongue, is a pretty hint to how new this is to him. He looks utterly stunned, completely transfixed by what she looks like sliding along his cock, and she’s for the first time genuinely enjoying sucking someone off. Normally this is a task, something she just _does_ because it’s expected—and she’d even kneeled this time with a kind of wry reluctance—but now that she’s down here, teasing the tip of his dick with her tongue with her hand between his legs stroking his balls and feeling them tighten in her palm, it’s not as dull as she remembers it being. For one, he’s gorgeously receptive. The water pattering against his back as he does his damndest to make sure she doesn’t get accidentally waterboarded and with his hand stroking her hair, his mouth moving without making any sound as he muffles his gasps and moans; this is a treat to see and, she assumes, enjoyable for him too.

She pops free, licking up the length of him with a careful focus on the tip just to be gratified by a trickle of pre-cum on her tongue, before glancing up to him to find his expression tantalisingly unfocused. With a dull ache in her jaw reminding her its been a while, she kisses up his dick for a moment before pushing her hair back so it stops getting in her mouth—he sees her fighting with it and his stroking hands come down to pull it back for her, keeping it out of her way without having to be asked—and asking him if he wants to come in her mouth. She’s not feeling very drunk anymore, just very bold, and he looks like he’s at much the same point she is.

He’s silent, eyes doing that panic whale-eye wideness again as he contemplates that.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “I… don’t know. Isn’t that unpleasant for you?”

She shrugs uncaringly, but that doesn’t seem to be the right answer because he frowns, his dick flagging for a moment until she strokes it back to attention, her knees twinging a bit on the floor of the shower.

“What do _you_ prefer?” he pushes, thumb stroking the skin of her throat from where he’s still holding her hair.

“It’s not about me,” she counters. “I’m sucking _your_ dick, not mine, birthday boy.”

“Any sexual contact between us is about the both of us,” he snaps back, so fierce in that second that she’s more aroused by that than his dick in front of her. She wonders what it would take to tempt him into aiming that ferocity her way during sex—while also wondering what that says about her. “I want my pleasure to be _your_ pleasure, just as much as I find it arousing to see you aroused. I have no preferences set, no experience to draw from—just yours. And if that’s unpleasant to you, I have no desire to experience you suffering it for my sake.”

She stares at him, feeling a little off-centre. Outside this shower, time is definitely ticking on, but right now, in here, it feels frozen. Finally, she speaks.

“I don’t mind,” she says, her heart hammering like she’s admitting some great secret. “The texture is unsettling, but I like the tactile feedback of feeling my partner climaxing. I had a partner who preferred to come… well, he liked seeing his come on me. I hated that. I _hate_ that, how it feels. Swallowing, fine, but not… on my face.” She has to bite back the _please_ and the _if that’s okay_ that almost slip out of her mouth, wondering when the fuck she’d gotten to be so mousey in bed. When had she decided it was fine to lay down and let her partners’ preferences overrule hers?

At what point had she stopped caring without even realising?

He gives her an odd look. “Why would you let him do it if you hate it so much? Your tenses suggest it happened multiple times, and I can only imagine the titillation from that comes from the visual of it… which I hardly doubt would have been nice if you were unhappy.”

She doesn’t relay have an answer for that. “Marking territory,” she mutters, seeing his expression darken a little. “It’s fine, Rob. Just bear with me, okay. I’m learning, same as you.”

It’s a weird feeling to realise how true that is. Despite her age, despite her experience, everything about this is new.

He nods, smiling at her with the water still thudding out a rhythm against his back.

“So long as you’re enjoying it with me,” he says finally, closing his eyes and letting his head tip back just a little as she swallows him down again, this time with her own body throbbing along with him. And this time, as he moans out her name in a way she’s _never_ going to forget, not ever, and chokes out a warning that he’s close, there’s nothing she doesn’t enjoy about feeling it happen—especially not when his hands on her shoulders pull her up before he’s even finished coming, letting her spit and rinse her mouth with water from the shower before dragging her into a kiss that’s so fierce and flavoured with him, a kiss that’s so breathlessly frantic on his end that she knows he’s still on the tail end of his climax. Especially not when he breathes her name again into her mouth—a gasped _Emily_ —that barely hides what he chokes back after.

She’d laugh at him, honestly, because it’s such a virgin thing to almost let loose the word _love_ during sex, but, honestly, she’d almost done the same thing too.

That terrifies her.

 

_Night 100. Room 302. October 29, 2001. 00:21._

She’s not surprised when he leads her to the bed after their shower, but she’s also never been this excited to have a man between her legs before. He’s kissing up her inner knee and thigh, hand sliding the towel up slowly as he goes, and wild horses couldn’t drag her away from what she knows his pretty mouth is going to do to her.

“Have you ever eaten a woman out before?” she asks him, already knowing the answer before he shakes his hand with his damp hair flipping about. “You might not like the taste. It can be off-putting, I’m told.”

She’s not sure what the sharp look he gives her means, but is distracted from asking by him tilting his jaw into a stubborn line before asking, “May I taste you then?”

Jesus, fuck, she thinks distantly, her body searing hot at every point at the polite query. She remembers back to when she met him, how breakable he seemed—still seems—even as she nods and lets her legs fall open. The way he peels the towel back is decadent, studying her with such a curious kind of ferocity that she has to measure her breathing so she doesn’t look like she’s panting. But he doesn’t dip his mouth forward, his tongue flicking out to taste what she has to offer—instead he leans his cheek against her knee and uses one long finger to trace down the centre of her, giving her a startled look.

“You’re so…” He pauses, flushing red before whispering, “ _wet_ ,” like he’s scared someone will hear him.

“I can’t help what you do to me,” she tells him, barely managing a smile through her searing arousal when he gives her an awed look and the soft cock between his legs twitches awake despite having just come before. Oh, to be twenty-one again…

And when he slides that finger into her before bringing it to his lips, tasting her without ever looking away from her face, that’s probably the point she stops being able to take conscious note of what he does to her. She’s not even really sure what he says after that—something like _fascinating—_ just that suddenly she’s looking down on a mop of wavy hair between her legs and his neck is crinked at a ridiculous angle in order to let him trace his tongue along the same path his finger had just taken.

“Talk me through what will make you feel good,” he says, his breath warm on her clit, but immediately follows that by licking her curiously.

Instead of answering, she moans involuntarily, feeling another flush of wet from deep inside her join the rest.

“Oh my god,” she hears him gasp, before suddenly giving up on being precise or careful and just launching forward. He’s a wet, hot, frantic pressure of tongue and warmth, with no real strategy other than being as energetic as possible while covering as much ground as possible—and it works, oh fuck, it works. The noises they’re making would be disgusting if she wasn’t as aroused as she is and she has absolutely no control over her breathing anymore, just resigning herself to panting frantically—before realising that she’s, for the first time ever, gasping his name along with her moans, hips bucking into him as his tongue slips into her, his hands bracing himself against her hips. She’s gasping his name, or the name she knows him as. He’s hard again with his cock rubbing against her leg and leaving a thin line of wet behind.

It’s too much, it’s too much, and she grabs him and hauls him up onto the bed. The towel is gone as they fall into a frantic fumble of arms and legs, his arms around her and her tumbling into him, the bed complaining about their enthusiasm under them. And she’s kissing him breathlessly, not even noticing the absolute mess she’s made of his face, with him atop her and her legs wrapped around him. With every twist of their bodies, every shift of their hips, they’re wet and hard and rutting against each other, his cock between her legs and sliding right through the centre of her.

When his tongue dips into her mouth, teasing at her lip just like he had her clit, she bucks into him and feels his dick catch and slip, just the tip, inside her.

They freeze, Robert rigid and her trembling. He pulls out carefully but then, before she can apologise, shifts his hips so his dick is sliding along her—slower than before but purposeful now, as he finds what he’s looking for and pushes in just a little bit more with a low groan twisting out from deep inside her.

“It’s okay,” she pants, realising how sore and tight she is from holding back. “Robert, oh god, oh fuck. It’s okay. I want you inside me, _fuck._ Just push in, just a bit more, please.”

“Condom,” he breathes but, despite this, she feels him slide in just that tiny bit deeper, pull out, push in. “We need a condom for, _ah,_ sex…”

The way he breathes the word _sex_ fucks her up, his hips quickening with it like his brain has grabbed the word and suddenly he’s all animal instinct. Hips shifting, his dick teasing her, his head drooping so he’s gasping hard against her shoulder.

“I’m on the pill,” she tells him—which he knows, but they’ve never really discussed with intent. “I use protection with others. I’m clean and I want to feel _you_ , just you.” Her turn to close her eyes and press her face into him, feeling her nails bite at the skin of her back as she scrabbles at him, suddenly desperate to feel him close. Everything else feels unimportant compared to this. “You’re so different to everyone else, I want this to be different too.”

It’s never been like this with any one else before. Never.

He gives her a strange look, an almost overwhelmed look tempered with the glazed arousal, but suddenly he’s rolled her onto her side, hugged her so tight there isn’t an inch of air between them, and his dick is pushing slowly into her. Incrementally out and in, and he slips out twice with whimpers of frustration before she reaches down a hand to help him—her eyes locked on his face as she takes him in hand, guides him straight, and tells him to thrust.

And he’s in. For a glorious, heartbreaking moment, he’s inside her and getting deeper—she’s never come without clitoral stimulation, but she’s never been this fucking aroused this early into sex—and she cries out his name is a voice that’s going to carry because she’s already almost there. Distantly, she wonders how fucked he is, his cock’s first foray into sex being into a vagina that’s already tightening and rippled around him as her climax builds—only to realise he’s said something stunning.

She tries to switch her brain back on, to hear him say that again before she comes completely.

“Wh-what?” she stammers, feeling him beginning to move in her, shallow, uncertain thrusts that are more instinct than anything else.

“Spencer,” he says again, her brain misfiring hard around how perfect that name is for him, how elegantly it encapsulates all his weirdness and wonderfulness all at once. “My name is Spencer.”

It feels obscene that the first time she’s going to cry out his name is during sex, but it’s on the tip of her tongue as she shudders into a slow kind of undoing, kissing him as he chants her name and pushes back in—

There’s a shrill poly-syllabic tune by her ear that she’s never heard before, jerking away from it and feeling him go still. It takes a moment, both of them staring at each other blankly with his eyes all dark and his body covered in sweat, hair lank against his flushed forehead and chest heaving, before they realise what it is.

“Your cell,” she pants, trying to shake normality back into her life from where he’s ripped it out of her. “Is that your cell?”

His phone has never rung when he’s been with her before.

“I, uh,” he breathes, before suddenly coming back to life and pulling out, fumbling across the bed to grab for it. She winces as he answers with a cut off, “This is Dr Re—”, glancing back at her with a flinch and turning it into, “Sorry, who was speaking?”

She curls her knees up, feeling weird and off-kilter. There’s a hollow emptiness between her legs she’s not ready to let go of the hope of filling just yet, glancing slyly at him and shivering with desire when she sees his slick cock still hard and covered with her. If he didn’t sound so frazzled already—if he’d answered the phone to her with his voice sounding like _that,_ she’d have known instantly he was in the middle of something carnal and she wonders if the person on the other end knows too—she’d have crawled over there and kept working him up with her tongue until he was ready to finish what they’d started, phone call or no phone call.

But the husky hunger suddenly drops from his voice, a sharp worry overtaking it. She stares at him as he scrambles from the bed, asking now about medications and conflicts and stammering about flights, his dick now definitely soft, and there’s a not-so-small part of her that’s shattered that their morning has come to a sudden end.

But his worry is more pertinent. While he’s standing there with his cell in one hand, pressed to his ear, and his pants in the other as he circles in panicked spirals looking for his belongings, she tamps her body down and gets to work. It takes a second to help him gather his clothes as he continues his frantic conversation with the person on the other end—it sounds medical, so she’s assuming his mother’s doctor—before she slips from the room to shower fast and get dressed herself.

When she comes out, clean now and half-dressed, he’s standing there still naked staring at his darkened cell-phone. There’s a numb panic on his features that she knows intimately.

She takes charge.

“Shower,” she tells him firmly, taking the cell. “Shower and get dressed. Whatever is happening, I assume it’s happening in Vegas, which means there’s already going to be gap between your response as you travel there. You can take ten minutes to wrap your head around it.”

“I need to—” he manages, staring at her now with that same vacant terror, the empty wine bottles around them a sign of how unprepared for disaster either of them is. “I have to—”

“Shower,” she says again, waiting until he’s vanishing into the bathroom before sitting down and reaching for the phone book.

And the night ends.

 

_Night 100. Room 302. October 29, 2001. 01:14_

By the time he emerges, she has a list of available flights from here to Vegas, having guessed that’s where he’s heading since he didn’t correct her before. They’re lined up neatly on the notepad she’s been writing on, each with the ticket price beside it. He comes to stand next to her, staring down at them.

“Your fastest options are the most expensive,” she warns him, tapping her pen on them. “You don’t have emergency savings to draw on, do you?”

“No,” he says, stark panic replacing the numbness. “I have money put away, but it’s earmarked for the payments to mom’s care—if I pull from it, I can’t make—”

She cuts him off, circling the top option. “That’s what I figured,” she says, pushing the pad towards him. “Book this one. I have them tentatively holding it for you under my name—if you call now, you’ll get it, but you need to be fast before it leaves at half four.”

“I can’t afford this,” he responds, without moving.

“I can,” she says. He doesn’t look surprised, just resigned. “Call them. I’ll write you a cheque.”

“Emily…”

But she gives him the same stare she gives the perps at work, the stare she’s seems to leave there every night when she slides out of the skin of Agent Prentiss and instead becomes the woman who lets people take what they want from her—until him. This is freely offered, freely given, and he needs to understand how important that is to her that he take it.

In the end, she doesn’t need to explain. He just nods, looking somehow crushed like he’s failed utterly, and rasps out, “I’ll pay you back, somehow. I promise, I’ll get another job and—”

“Don’t you fucking dare. I swear, Spencer, I don’t want to see a cent from you, okay?”

He breathes in sharply. She realises: she just used his real name.

“I knew it would sound amazing in your voice,” he says, a soft hint of his real smile slipping through the worry, but then the fear is back and he’s taking the phone and time is moving fast again.

And, when he’s ready to go, she kisses him goodbye and tells him to call her when he lands. They part without fanfare, Emily only pausing once to glance back at the bed they’d almost found each other within for the first time.

But she’s sure they’ll have another chance.

 

_Night 101. Room 302. November 13, 2001. 20:15._

He hadn’t called her after his mother so, when she gets a text from him asking to meet, she’s immediately worried that she’s going to be comforting him through his grief. The booking she makes is the fastest one yet, texting him back within the hour telling him she can meet him that night as soon as she’s finished work.

Five minutes after that, she’d been called into her supervisor’s office and had a conversation with him that’s thrown her completely off-course.

And now here she is. Sitting in the hotel room waiting for him—he’s late, which is astoundingly unusual but tonight she’s glad for it because it gives her time to gather her thoughts—wondering what the fuck she’s going to do.

He’s over an hour late, stepping into the room with his shoulders tense and looking wired, a plastic shopping bag dripping with condensation hanging from one hand. She keeps her distance when she greets him, the two of them lingering at opposite sides of the kitchen island as they quietly luxuriate in all the awkward silence. The bag he’s holding smells delicious, and he holds it out as he apologises for being late before falling quiet at her non-reaction.

“How’s your mom?” she asks finally, breaking that silence.

“She’s okay,” he answers. “I worked out a new medication regime with her doctor that should avoid any more conflicts while still maintaining her quality of life.”

“That’s good.”

The silence returns, his brow furrowing with a new kind of anxiety overlaying the tension as he puts the bag onto the counter and then stands there with his hands hanging by his side. Emily’s news lingers over her like an oncoming storm blowing away the joy of their last meeting, opening and closing her mouth three times as she tries to work out how to say it. She’s never been good at this bit—the bumpy parts of caring for someone. The uprooting of it all. Goodbyes she might be practised at, but that’s really only because she’s had so many she’s learned not to care that much at the outset.

This time? She cares. She cares so much.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” he blurts out suddenly, covering the room in two great strides and reaching for her hand. She lets him take it, stepping closer to him and closing her eyes as he holds her close. Treasuring his continued heartbeat against her ear. “I meant to, but I was exhausted on the plane and then dealing with Mom… and when I got home, uh. Something happened that we should talk about.”

“Same here,” she says, feeling nauseous now the moment is here. She doesn’t want to hurt him. She doesn’t want to hurt _herself_ , but it’s a bit late for that. “You first.”

He nods, following her to the bed and sitting beside her. Neither look at the other.

His voice is quiet.

“I got a job offer,” he says. She can’t tell what the tone of voice he’s using means—if it’s worried or excited or sad or a bit of everything. “An… an _amazing_ one. And I don’t even know how to begin telling you…”

Her heart skips a little. That’s promising. “Oh,” she says, realising both what this means and where he could be leading them—maybe this goodbye isn’t just hers. “Salaried? Benefits?” He nods to both. “Enough for you and your mom’s care?” Another nod. “So, you’re quitting the escort service?”

“I’ve quit already,” he says. “It was the first thing I did once the position was confirmed. It’s not the kind of job where I want this work arising again in the future.”

“Oh.” She stares at her knees, steeling herself. “Well, I guess that’s opportune, that we both go our separate ways at once…”

She’s trying to minimize it, but it still hurts.

“Yeah—wait, what?” His head snaps around, eyes narrowing as a stark panic darts across his features. For a second, he looks his age: painfully young and so fucking vulnerable she wants to gather him up and shelter him from the world. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? All her pretty fantasies about a life with him, all her hopeful dreams… in the end, he’s a kid just starting out with everything he needs to protect, and she’s a jaded thirty-one-year-old woman getting pushed out of the door to make room for others with more potential. “You’re leaving?”

“Transfer,” she answers numbly. “To the Midwest. It’s ‘optional’, but I’m under no illusions about that… if I don’t take this, I’ll be sidelined. So I’m taking it.”

“Oh.”

He doesn’t say anything else, just looks quietly heartbroken beside her, which is confusing.

“Isn’t your job taking you away too?” she presses, wondering why he looks like he’s had something he was excited for suddenly ripped away from him. “I assumed that’s what you were leading towards.”

“Hm?” He gives her a vacant look, before half-shrugging. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is. I guess, yeah. What about your dreams of the BAU? You can’t give up on that—you’d be a wonderful profiler, you really would.”

His hand is fumbling for hers again. For the last time, she lets him hold it, ignoring how much this hurts. Ignoring all the space in the room left over for their emotions to echo about in.

Ignoring the bed they’re on and the promise of more it offered them only a month ago.

“Dreams are just future heartbreak,” she says, already packing this moment away with all the other moments they’ve had. Boxing it up into some dark corner of her mind to sit with every other misery. “Here’s my last advice, kiddo—don’t dream. Just live. It’s easier.”

“Noted,” he says. “But maybe one day you’ll come back?”

She ignores the desperation in his voice. It’ll only hurt him more if she acknowledges it.

“I don’t think so,” she tells him firmly before taking back her hand. “I’ve never been fond of DC. Too many people like my mother. Anyway, we should go. There’s no point lingering. I doubt we’ll see each other again.”

She goes for her keys, her bag, her coat, almost dropping her purse in her hurry to escape. There’s a burning behind her eyes and a building lump in her chest that she’s ignoring, turning and finding him still sitting on the bed staring after her with a woeful expression that cuts right into that lump and releases pain instead of discomfort. Gasping against it, she grips her keys tight, looks away so he doesn’t realise her eyes are watering, and says, “Seeya, Robert. Don’t overwork yourself, okay?”

Her choice of name is very deliberate.

“You don’t need to go, I bought dinner with me and thought we could—”

But she’s already out the door, letting it bang shut behind her to be sure he understands how final this is. When heartbreak is coming, it’s best to be over with fast. That’s how she’s always done it in the past, and she refuses to change that now. No lingering. Just a clean, vicious break as she slams the door on that particular fragment of her life, resigning it firmly to the past.

It hurts more than she’d ever imagined it would.


	5. November 15, 2006 – January 01, 2007

_204 16 th Street. November 15, 2006. 08:05._

This is it.

Emily feels like the ghost of Robert is reaching from the past to tap her on the shoulder with his curious smile and a shy, “I told you so,” for her ever daring to doubt her dreams. As she tries to settle on which blouse to wear—she wants to look professional but capable and also like she could kick ass if she needed, and she’s yet to find a ladies brand that encapsulates all those looks at once—she’s smiling a little to think of his firm assurance that she’d do this one day.

Even if it still hurts a bit to think of how they’d ended, she still smiles to remember him.

“Right,” she says out loud in her silent apartment, looking around at the packing boxes still everywhere, most of them dented and dust-covered from being in long-term storage while she was working in Europe. She doesn’t even know what’s in half of them, packed away long ago when JTF-12 came calling and she happily went in search of a challenge. Well, she’d certainly found a challenge, that was for sure, and his name was Ian Doyle.

She swallows and shoves that wayward thought to the back of her brain as it instead tries to puke up following thoughts. Things like _I wonder what he’s doing now_ and _remember his hands on you_ and _do you think he cried seeing Declan like that_ and the most dangerous of all _you miss him, don’t you?_

She doesn’t. She doesn’t think she does…

She really doesn’t know.

She touches her fingers to her hip where there’s a tattoo hidden by the waistband of her pants, the design hiding the thin line of scarring from a wayward bullet three months after leaving DC. It had almost killed her and, for a moment while lying there recognising the burning pain on her hip as a bullet wound, she’d contemplating staying down and letting the perp finish the job. But she hadn’t. She’d gotten up. And when it was all done and over and healed, with the thought of Robert lingering still and his horror at the concept of her demise, she’d gone and gotten the ink as a reminder to keep on getting up, even if it didn’t feel like she should at the time. So there. She might have broken his heart, but she’d kept up her end of the deal—she was still alive and intended to stay that way, at first for him, wherever he was, and now that he’s just a faded kind of memory, purely for her.

Maybe this job is a kind of reward for that persistence.

But the alarm on her cell shrills, reminding her that it’s almost time to commute to a new job, a new start, a new life. The BAU, finally. She’s going to be a profiler, and all on her own back. Robert and Ian and her mother, none of them did this, getting her here—she did. By herself.

And now she just needs to prove that it’s where she belongs.

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. November 19, 2006. 23:43._

There’s one major positive about being able to compartmentalise like she can: she’s absolutely able to hide her utter astonishment at walking into the conference room to meet the rest of her new team and finding Robert sitting there staring at her like she’s a ghost. It’s important that she hide that astonishment because, as soon as he’d managed to obscure his own shock, he’d greeted her like she was completely new to him—and until she finds a chance to talk to him properly, she intends to follow his example. After all, this is his life and career that she’s waltzed in on, bringing all the shadows of his past, and he’s the one with everything to lose.

That chance is a long time coming. By the time they’ve flown back to DC from Gitmo, debriefed both with the team and with Gideon and Hotchner alone, and then waded through their respective piles of paperwork, it’s almost half ten at night. Robert—Reid, his name is Reid, Spencer Reid—looks exhausted, Emily _is_ exhausted, and she’s never felt so fucking awkward sitting three feet from the person on the desk over from her before.

To confront that awkwardness face on, she offers to drive him home. Apparently, he public transports into work, which is a horrendous thing to contemplate at this level of wiped out, as is the thought of the conversation they’re probably going to have at some point tonight. But it really needs to be done before they walk back into the BAU tomorrow still pretending.

She assumes that he realises this, because he agrees. And the awkward desk-sitting suddenly becomes an awkward drive, the radio silent in case either of them want to talk. Neither of them do.

At his apartment building, she parks—still in silence—and stares at the steering wheel. He doesn’t get out of the car, just sits there with the battered shoulder tote he carries around resting on his lap, hands curled around it and staring at the fog in the corner of her windscreen.

Finally, he says it: “You should probably come up.”

The sound of her seatbelt unbuckling is deafening.

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. November 20, 2006. 00:14._

He makes them coffee and ducks away to the bathroom with her sitting at his cluttered kitchen table looking around, for the first time, at his home. It’s a startling feeling. This man who looks everything and nothing like the boy she left sitting on that bed, he’s real in a way Robert never was. There are shelves of books and art prints and notebooks scattered everywhere, journals scattered over top of closed manila folders and a basket of what looks like wool and knitting needles next to a deeply worn-in couch. The kitchen right now smells like coffee with a slight air of being closed in more often than not, but there’s a scent underlying that that she recognises as being very innately _him_. This is his home, Spencer Reid’s home. He exists here. He lives here.

Not as Robert, the boy who only existed when she texted him and told him to exist for her. This is Spencer’s home—the man who’d almost tripped into love, the man who’d whispered his name into her ear right in the middle of that dangerous fall. This is the man she had sex with that day, not the boy she’d flirted with up until that point.

It’s a mind-blowing realisation.

And, strangely, she feels stricken by it. The feeling that hits her is all the shock and adrenaline of the day catching up and leaving her dizzy and nauseous with it. It’s not just the crash of her first case, and it’s not just him being _here_ catching up on her; a little part of her is grieving like she hasn’t grieved in years because it’s right here in this warm kitchen that she’s realised the boy she knew isn’t just gone: she’s realised that he never actually existed in the first place.

“Did I make it wrong?” Ro—Reid asks, standing in the doorway and looking at her coffee. She hasn’t touched it. “I can make another?”

“No, it’s fine.” She sips, tasting nothing and wincing as she puts the mug down too hard, gently nudging a NatGeo out of the way of any unfortunate spills. “So, uh. Wow. Just… wow.”

“Wow,” he agrees. He sits down hard across from her, curling his hands around his mug and breathing through his mouth like the crash is hitting him too. “I really don’t know what to say.”

“Neither.”

Instead of talking, she stares at him. Trying to see where he’s changed, if he has—but he _has_ to have, because how can shades of her Robert still be here in this man she watched help take down a terrorist today? From behind a glass window, she notes and is glad for, because for all her grief she can still see Rob. The same vulnerable eyes, the same shy smile even though he’s not smiling right now. The same gorgeous cheekbones except now they’re on a face that’s just the tiniest bit older. He has lines around his eyes, very fine and easily masked by clever lighting, as well as deep purple shadows below those eyes that aren’t so easily masked at all. He looks tired. He looks young.

He doesn’t look at all like the kind of person she’d expect to be able to do this job, and a small part of her is pissed off that she had to fight tooth and nail to get here while he—twenty-five, barely, what the _fuck_ —apparently waltzed right into it. Even now, she knows there are whispers of nepotism, of her using her parents to get her foot in.

He’s staring right back, open captivation hidden below that exhaustion. “It’s fascinating how similar you are to my recollection of you,” he says. “You’ve hardly changed at all from that day.”

“You’ve changed a little,” she admits. His hair had been getting long when she’d known him. It’s still long now, but less than it had been and no longer borderline unkempt, like he knows what to do with it now even if that just amounts to him brushing it back out of his face. It’s a nice length on him. The ends curl prettily, and it waves in a charming way around his face. She likes it. “Shit, Ro… Spen—Reid? Fuck, I have no idea what to call you.”

“Just Reid. Robert is… unwise.” They laugh, but their laughs are thin. “And Spencer is too familiar. Morgan especially would ask questions. I… I wish I’d reacted differently today, thought faster. Pretended to know you in some other way than the truth. It’s going to be difficult to act like I don’t know you now, especially with these people. Observant is an understatement.”

“It’s not going to be hard at all to act like I don’t know you.”

She regrets it as soon as she says it, seeing his expression close off a little with a practised kind of guarded that’s completely new and utterly heartbreaking. Did she do that? Teach him that?

“So, what do we do now?” he asks her without meeting her gaze, instead looking at a point just over her shoulder.

“I don’t know,” she says honestly, even though the thing she really wants to say is ‘start over’.

 

_204 16 th Street. December 18, 2006. 18:39._

He’s insufferable.

Emily slams her door shut and stalks into her apartment, glaring around at the empty space like it’s responsible for all the arrogant, frustrating men in her life. She definitely wasn’t wrong when she’d thought that Spencer fucking Reid is nothing like Robert, because her Robert is _nothing_ like this ass.

“What a _dick,”_ she snaps, taking her anger out on her gun-safe as she whirls the dial and swings the door of it open too hard, the handle taking a chunk out of her cupboard. That’s also his fault, she decides, just like Hotch ripping shreds out of her today for failing to work as a team, and just like the team’s compounding doubt about her is his fault as well. She’s going to end up fired, with his smug face watching her get drummed out the door. “Bah. _Asshole.”_

Mood too foul to face cooking dinner, she has a piece of toast and cracks open a new bottle of wine, finishing two glasses too fast in the silence of her apartment. She’s angry and upset and not lonely at all, thank you very much, as she flips from being mad at the TV for not having anything to watch to being frustrated with her book for failing to interest her. A shower, she decides. Or bath. Bath and wine and she won’t even think about him once. That’s exactly what she needs.

Twenty minutes into said bath, as she’s finally relaxing and shaking the memories of this last case from her shoulders, there’s a knock at her door.

“Fuck,” she tells the bath’s faucet before climbing out and reaching for her robe. Dripping wet and annoyance returning, she’s expecting her neighbour asking for sugar again. After all, she didn’t buzz anyone up and no one can enter the building without a hob to let them in—

But checking the peep-hole dashes that thought.

“Go away,” she tells him as she swings the door open and sends her fiercest glare his way. Reid just stands there, his expression mulish, and doesn’t move. “I’m having a bath, and how the hell did you get in anyway?”

“I have a badge,” he points out, which startles her. He’s not the kind of person she’d expect to have pulled rank to sneak up here, having gotten the unflattering impression of him being a wet little ass-kisser in the time between beginning at the BAU and now. “And we need to talk. I figured you wouldn’t let me up if I came in the usual way, since you’ve been avoiding me all month.”

“I have not,” she retorts. “You’re the one who keeps trying to drag me through the mud with Hotchner. What the hell is that?”

“Me? You’re the one who keeps second-guessing everything I do!”

Their voices are rising, and she catches a glimpse of a neighbour pausing and looking at them, clearly listening in.

“Oh, get in,” she snarls, turning and stalking back into her apartment. If they’re going to have it out, might as well at least have it out in private without her entire building lining up for a look at her in a bathrobe ripping strips out of the smarmy little prick.

The door closes quietly behind her as she tries to calm herself down. Managing her emotions is easy for her now, except, apparently, where he comes into it. But she refuses to let him work her up—blaming the wine for her insurmountable anger right now—and doesn’t turn around for a moment as she focuses hard on compartmentalising it away.

“Shoes by the door?” he asks politely.

“If you want.”

The only sound in the apartment aside from her portable radio still playing Debussy in the bathroom is the soft noise from him toeing his shoes off and lining them up neatly by hers. When she finally turns to face him, tightening the tie on her bathrobe as she goes, he’s standing there in his socks watching her silently. Still in the same clothes he was wearing at work and, she notes, carrying his shoulder tote.

He hasn’t been home. She tenses as she realises: that means he’s armed.

His head tilts a bit and he frowns. “Why did you just flinch?” he asks.

“I didn’t,” she lies.

“Yes, you did. You’re tense now. I’m sorry it got a little… I really do think we need to talk out this tension between us, and I’m not here to fight.” He smiles a little sheepishly, the emotion failing to reach his eyes, and tucks a lock of wayward hair behind his ear. “We might have gotten off on the wrong foot.” But he frowns, the sheepish smile vanishing completely. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?” She’s not doing anything, just standing here. Whatever fault he’s seeing in her now, he’s imagining it. Sourly, she wishes he was just as imaginative at work—there, the faults he doesn’t hesitate to call her out on strike way too close to home.

“Closing me out. You were angry when I got here… it’s barely three minutes since I walked in that door and now you’re looking at me like I’m nothing.”

She bites back the anger that tries to shove past her walls, a vivid memory of him snapping _emotions aren’t a weakness, Prentiss,_ at her in front of both JJ and Gideon surmounting suddenly. The look JJ had given her still burns in her mind, the embarrassment of that moment pulling that burn to her cheeks.

“I don’t second-guess you,” she settles for saying, crossing her arms when they begin to feel awkward by her sides.

His bark of laughter is mocking. “What? Yes, you do. You keep volunteering to take my place in the field, leaving me in the precincts when Hotch splits us up! And every time we get paired up, you keep leaving me in the car, like I’m a dog you can’t take in with you in case it makes a mess.”

“I do not!” But, even as she says it, multiple occurrences of this very thing pop up in her mind and make a liar out of her, seeing his eyebrow raising accusingly. “Okay, I’ve done that, but not to second-guess you. I know you can do your job, I’m just—”

“Assuming you’re more capable than me.”

“No, I—”

“Think I can’t do my job?”

She pauses, thrown. That’s her problem with _him,_ and it’s disconcerting to have it thrown back in her face like this. “I never said that,” she says. He’s starting to look annoyed again, looking everywhere but her face—a technique she’s realised he uses when he’s angry without any desire to use that anger. “Of course you can do your job. You’re a genius. There’s no one more qualified to do this job than you, is there?”

Now, he looks at her. “Oh,” he says softly. “There it is. You _resent_ me. This is why I never told you about where my job was, back before you walked out on me. I knew you’d feel like I’d simply been given the goal you were working so hard to obtain.”

Emily bites it down again, uncrossing her arms so she can hide her hands. “Isn’t that exactly what happened?” she asks, resenting the way she can’t hide the snarl in her voice. “Wait, I didn’t walk out on you—I mean, I did, but you _lied._ You said you were leaving!”

“Would it have changed anything?” he snaps, stepping forward.

She leans back on her heels away from his approach, brain for a second regretting the fact that her gun is away. The flush of hot panic is fast and hidden, as she successfully tamps it down and stands her ground.

“Yes, maybe,” she snaps back, emotions wheeling wildly as she tries to figure it out herself. “It _might_ have. We could have, I don’t know. I thought there was nothing we could do!”

“Ridiculous. Either way, we would have been a distance from each other—we could have made it work, you just got scared and bolted because you didn’t want to face something that makes you vulnerable. And now you’re taking it out on me at work, which is going to get you in more trouble with Hotch than anything I could tell him about you.” He walks forward now, clearly giving up on keeping his distance as he reaches for her arm. “Em, come on—don’t do this, don’t—”

But she’s jerked back from his hand, her brain dosing her hard with a shot of adrenaline she can’t hide from him.

He pauses, freezing on the spot. Finally, he takes two steps backwards and his body language changes instantly, hands fully in view and posture open as he stares at her with a strange expression.

She closes her eyes. Fuck.

“You _are_ scared of me,” he says, more to himself than to her. “Why? You’re not like this at work, with me or anyone else, not even the Unsubs.”

“You’re in my apartment,” she points out weakly, suddenly wishing the snarl was back instead of this choked whisper. “And you’re armed. And I don’t know what you want.”

None of those are good reasons, really, but her brain is twisting around Ian and his hands and wants and weapons, and the way he’d used all those things against her. He’d liked to make them fight before it too, never really enjoying fucking her unless they were angry. With him, she was always angry. Maybe that was a little bit of her problem—she needed that anger now, because it was how she’d survived.

Fuck, she thinks. She’s in the wrong here.

“Do you want me to leave?” Reid asks quietly, something unfathomable in his changeable eyes.

“No,” she decides, realising that she needs to do better. Ian isn’t here. “I want you to stay for dinner, so I can apologise properly. And then I want us to do better.”

“Okay,” he agrees.

 

_204 16 th Street. December 19, 2006. 00:21._

She’s awake to listen to him leaving, but she doesn’t make a noise to let him know. Just stares at the shadows on the wall of her bedroom as he tries to dress as quietly as possible before slipping out of the door. It feels like a story they’ve shared so many times before, familiar in places but heart-breakingly different in others.

They’d had dinner and the wine Emily rescued from the bathroom. They’d talked, although after her initial apology, it hadn’t been about anything inconsequential.

She’d led him to the bedroom. He hadn’t stopped her, not even when she’d ended up kneeling in front of him finding out just how familiar he is to her. They’d both gotten off, him to her mouth and her to his hands, before lying in silence until sleep… but none of it had felt how it had used to be. There was nothing memorable or thrilling or terrifying about it. With his gun locked away beside hers and their anger dulled by the wine, it’s just sex. Perfunctory sex, meaningless and uninteresting.

He’d thanked her before they’d gone to sleep without touching, and now he’s sneaking out of the door like any other random hook-up. There’s nothing notable about it, aside from the few things that sting because of their difference—like the way he’s clearly had others since her and how he doesn’t look at her like she’s at all special to him anymore, his technique all his own now without anything he learned from her. She wonders if Doyle has changed how she is in bed too, some tangible difference about her, and suspects that maybe he has and maybe there’s no moving beyond that. She’s used goods now, nothing to offer him in the bedroom and with only anger to offer outside of it.

The door closes behind him and she closes her eyes, sure that this is proof that anything between them had died when Rob did.

This can’t happen again.

 

_204 16 th Street. December 31, 2006. 23:43._

It’s happening again.

She has no idea whose idea it was, New Years celebrations with her workmates, but she blames them entirely for this: they’d shared a taxi home and he’d offered to walk her up, both of them far too drunk for his chivalry to really matter at all, and they’re probably about to fuck up again if his hand up her shirt is anything to go by.

They’d been doing better at work since they’d talked, and that had probably made this inevitable, she thinks drunkenly and without any desire to stop it from happening.

“Put some effort into it,” she tells him with an eyeroll, sick of his tentative skimming of the outline of her bra. Her back is already against the wall in the hallway one down from hers, her lipstick half on him and making a mess of his confused-looking mouth: he might as well finish the job. “Christ, Reid, it’s a tit, not a venomous snake. You can _touch_ it.”

“Don’t backseat grope,” he replies pertly, earning a snort from her. Then, he pauses. A flicker of sobriety flashes over his face. “We probably shouldn’t do this. Our dynamic has already upset the team’s equilibrium, and I don’t think inebriated sex is going to—”

“Shh,” she tells him, silencing his mouth with hers. He’s probably right, but she’s drunk as hell and horny to boot, and that’s all tangling up with how much she misses waking up beside him, when he was Rob and she wasn’t quite as broken. Besides, they’ve been better lately. Hotch even said so himself, complimenting them on how well they were working together now after their rocky start.

Sure, he still undermines her—although now only sometimes instead of always—and she still mistrusts his ability to have her back, but they’re getting there. And that has nothing to do with the fact that she’s been wet since he got in the taxi with her while completely failing to hide his lingering attraction to her that had been delicately tenting his thin pants.

His hand gets a clue and slides around her back to undo the pesky bra, suddenly slipping under to tease at her nipple, and she rewards him with a happy hiss of air and her body twisting into his. He reacts splendidly, cocking his hip against her and humming a breathless sound into her hair, his body over-warm and swaying a bit. Or maybe they’re both swaying, she doesn’t really know, just tips her head down to avoid having to kiss him—not that he’s tried yet, years between their last kiss and now, but just in case.

There’s a cough up and the hall and they break apart, grinning guiltily at the man scowling at them before making a break for the stairs. She can tell that Reid’s just barely managing not to laugh, and she’s feeling much the same.

“You better be worth how much of a whore he now thinks I am,” she throws back at Reid as they take the stairs with an enthusiasm she knows will hurt in the morning.

“Maybe he’s just jealous,” Reid responds with the ghost of Rob’s good humour.

“Probably,” Emily agrees. “After all, you do have a very clever mouth.”

 

_204 16 th Street. December 31, 2006. 23:43._

They don’t even make it to the bedroom. He has her propped with her bare ass on the kitchen table and her legs wrapped around him, her pants and underwear somewhere between here and the front door. With one of his arms curled tight around her shoulder, the other hand in her hair, she’s twined tight to him in just her knit-sweater—having impressed him greatly by removing the bra without taking her top off—panting against his shirt as her hands fumble at his belt. He’s still dressed, having clearly forgotten that part in his drunken arousal, and is making her job twice as hard as it needs to be by rutting his hard dick against her through his pants.

“I’m making a mess of your pants,” she tells him, adding to the problem by tightening her legs and pulling herself harder against him in a move that would have had him slamming deep if they didn’t have so much fucking material between his cock and her.

He pulls away so he can look down, laughs, and then looks at her while still laughing.

The moment catches. Emily’s breath catches too. Watching his eyes widen, something strange flickering into his expression. His hand in her hair shifts just a little, his throat bobbing as he swallows. And, something in her slams hard and then thumps to life, seeing something strange and familiar in those hazy eyes staring at her with his laugh still bright in them.

_Oh,_ she thinks, looking harder and finding that laugh on his lip-sticked mouth and curled around the corners of his eyes. That’s Rob’s laugh.

“Oh,” she breathes out loud, feeling his hand going from possessively tugging at her hair in just the way that gets her off to instead stroking down the curve of her skull, fingers touching at her jaw like she’s made of a delicately-spun glass.

She doesn’t know who leans in first and who responds, just that they’re suddenly kissing and it’s more than she knows what to do with. His kissing is different from how she remembers it, flavoured with desperation and scotch. It’s damp and fretful, their hands trying to catch onto just as much of the other person as they can, him nipping at her lip before slipping his tongue in with more hunger than he’s ever shown. He’s trying to claim her, a shade of frustration in the way he shoves her back against the table, but she doesn’t mind because she’s kissing with just as much ferocity.

His belt comes undone in her hands without her having realised she was undoing it. He jolts, his hands joining hers to help her struggle through the rest of his clothes until they’re barely off and his cock is in her hands.

When he twines his arm around her and tugs her tight to him as he bows low for a second and mouths at her throat, suddenly hard between her legs and pushing demandingly against her, the rush of arousal that sweeps through her wipes all her good sense, her mouth crying out on its own.

She only realises what she’s said when he twitches around to look at her, dark eyes wide.

“Don’t,” he gasps, a thin line of sweat trailing down the side of his face and his hair plastered to it. “Don’t apologise. Don’t change it.”

And he’s throbbing against her like he likes it, so she obeys and says it again.

“Robert,” she calls him, fighting him for a handhold until she figures out that she can hang onto his skinny hips. “Oh fuck, Rob, come on. Come _on.”_

He does as told, panting her name and twisting in their shared grip on each other until he’s kissing her again with furious intent. She meets that intensity and matches it, until suddenly he jerks hard against her—and she arches and chokes out another spluttered recitation of the name she’d known him by as he’s suddenly pushing into her, hips twitching twice before pushing hard home.

They stand like that for a moment, her arched with her toes barely brushing the ground and him rigid against her, mouth twisted like he’s in pain and eyes scrunched shut.

“Thrust, fuck you, _thrust,_ ” she snaps, the tension snapping with her. Not needing to be told twice, suddenly he’s shoving her back against the table—she hears something clatter over, probably her salt shaker, and the legs grate hard on the tiles—his rhythm just slightly off from hers. They’re too tight together for him to get to her clit, but she doesn’t really care right now, just reaches up to his hair and threads her fingers through, pulling when he squeaks with surprise and gets, somehow, harder inside her.

His breathing is getting increasingly more erratic against her, trying to kiss her deeply and having to break apart twice to gasp for air. Emily’s brain whirls with it all—a part of it slowly realising that this is the first time they’ve gone this far and it’s nothing like she expected, another part drunkenly wondering why neither of them had stopped to ask about protection, yet another part fantasising furiously that she’s the first one to fuck him this hard—but she ignores it and wishes his shirt was off so she could run her fingers down his back and feel him buck against her.

“I can feel you getting close,” she tells him, losing her balance on the table edge as he staggers slightly. It hurts her feet when she lands hard on them, Rob slipping out and almost swearing with the frustration of it, but she just grabs him by his tie and hauls his ass over to the couch. And she yelps, “Fuck!” because he’s quick when he’s focused on something, tumbling with her onto the couch and finding his way unerringly back inside her. It’s a better angle; like this, his clever fingers can find her clit and it only takes him ten seconds to have him snarling out his name and tightening around him, daring him to join her on the edge.

“I’m close, Em, I’m close,” he chants as she comes hard around him, letting him quickly shift position in a fast gangle of arms and legs until he’s on top of her and striking deep. “Just, I need, ahhh…”

Help, she figures, and makes sure to arch nicely with her half-open shirt gaping for him, wrapping her legs around him so he’s supporting her as he fucks her. And that’s a pretty sight, looking down on him between her legs like this, his tie scrunched from her hands and his shirt sticking to his sweaty skin, bare from the waist down with that polite cock she’d noted so long ago not so polite anymore as he buries it deep inside her and rocks it home over and over and over. But it doesn’t seem to be enough.

It clicks.

“Robert,” she gasps, not having to fake how breathless she is right now. “Look at me.”

He does, looking punch-drunk with more than just alcohol.

And she opens her mouth to say what she intends—to tell him that he’s different from everyone else and she wants this to be different too, to imply that this is their first time all over again and they never fucked up that first time—but she can’t. It sticks. The words won’t come, his brow furrowing a bit as he wonders what the hell she’s doing staring at him with her mouth frozen open.

But it doesn’t matter that she’s slammed hard against a drunken realisation, because he’s found the edge anyway and tossed himself over it without her help, his spine snapping straight as there’s a hot pulse of him inside her and a relieved groan trips from his slack mouth. It should be amazing, seeing this finally, but she’s still frozen.

She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want to pretend nothing has changed, grasping for the memory of someone who doesn’t exist. She doesn’t want to pretend.

She had to pretend with Doyle.

“Reid,” she rasps, feeling something wrap around her chest and bind tight as his weight is suddenly too much on her, still inside her and buckled forward as he catches his breath with his head on her shoulder. He doesn’t seem to hear her, and she can’t breathe anymore. She can’t breathe to talk or gasp or plead or—

He looks up, smiling a little. It’s a smile that vanishes fast when he looks at her, suddenly pulling out fast and scurrying off of her with a panic that has him toppling hard onto the ground. Distantly, she thinks he might have slammed some part of himself against the coffee table, but she’s too focused on not throwing up.

He’s there again, kneeling beside the couch with his hands awkwardly out in front of him. “Emily?” he calls, too far away for how close he is. “You’re hyperventilating.”

No, I’m not, she tells him, but he doesn’t seem to hear her. There are hands on her, helping her to sit up and then to bow her head down towards her knees, that hand remaining to rub at her back as another wraps tight around her shoulder and pulls her close.

They stay like that for a while, with his come leaking out of her to stain the couch below them and a horrified silence between them.

“Asking you to go away isn’t going to work, is it?” she tries, the words muffled by the skin of her bare legs and her back aching from being at this stupid angle, even as she’s grateful that he’s there to brush her hair out of her face.

“Not while you’re _crying,”_ he retorts, his voice sharp and worried. She hadn’t realised she was, but crying she is, her cheeks wet and the tears adding to the mess on her legs. Her poor couch. “Did I hurt you?”

She shakes her head.

He’s quiet for a second before speaking, the shades of Rob suddenly gone as Spencer surmounts once more. “Do you know why I get so angry at you at work?” he says, his voice a low hum. With no idea where he’s taking this, she shakes her head again and wonders if he realises his dick is still out. From the way he shifts in place, material rustling aside her and a soft sound of a zip before he returns without touching her, he finally noticed. “Because I can see it, you know. I saw it the first time you pulled your weapon and got between me and what you saw as danger.”

“Is this really the time to bring this up again?” she snaps, annoyance quickly draining the rest of her panic away and leaving her feeling stupid for whatever the fuck just happened. She really has no idea—it’s not like she hasn’t had sex since Doyle, and she’s never done _that._ “Really, Reid?”

“It has nothing to do with protecting me,” he says, staring at her with the same intent look he uses at work, like he’s trying to pick her apart to find the bits of her that aren’t working quite right anymore. “Maybe it has a little bit to do with you still seeing me as Rob, as someone you feel responsible for, but that’s not all of it, is it? Most of it is because, if someone has to take a hit, you want it to be _you.”_

“Definitely not the time,” Emily says, standing and scowling as gravity does disgusting things between her legs. There’s no way she can storm out of this room before he profiles the shit out of her and retain her dignity, not with her legs clamped together to save the carpet. “I have no idea what this—”

“It has everything to do with what just happened,” Reid says, standing too with his expression more upset than the moment requires. The panic is gone. All Emily feels now is drunk and tired and sweaty and like she desperately needs to piss before a UTI takes hold. “I think you finally did it, didn’t you? You found someone more capable of doing what Todd couldn’t, and what I wouldn’t—you found someone willing to hurt you in all the ways you think you deserve, didn’t you? Was it as painful as you’d hoped it would be?”

There’s a shattered kind of resignation in his expression and she remembers: he’s always worried about the way she lives her life, always.

Maybe that’s why when she goes to lie, what she instead finds herself saying is, “More.”

 

_204 16 th Street. January 01, 2007. 00:35._

She’s smoking on her balcony, showered and clean and sober, now, and he’s sitting beside her watching the clouds overhead.

It’s a new year.

“I quit, you know,” she says into the quiet, ignoring the raucous sounds of partying going on around them. On this balcony, between them, they’re silent. “Smoking. After it all, I figured… I don’t know. You’d be proud of knowing, even if I never got to tell you.”

“I am,” he replies softly. “I’d be prouder if you hadn’t just lit a cigarette, though.”

That’s fair. She sucks down one last pull and stubs it out, leaving it butted out in a candle she has sitting there and letting her head thump back against her wall.

“I saw it again tonight, you know,” he says suddenly, looking at her. She shrugs, confused. “Saw you, and me. That feeling we had between us, five years ago. I don’t think it’s gone.”

“Wishful thinking,” she says, wishing it was otherwise.

“No.” His voice is quiet, but intent despite that. “I don’t think it is. I know my Emily is still in there, wound up with all this anger and hurt you’re carrying. The woman I fell in love with because she never let me degrade myself, because she kept reminding me I have value. I never slept with a client, you know.” She hadn’t known that. Suspected it, yeah, but never known. It’s weirdly comforting. He continues: “Sometimes I came close, but I never did—because I’d think, ‘Emily would be disappointed if she knew I thought this little of myself’, and then I wouldn’t go through with it. And, yeah, now I recognise that it was a sign of my own lack of self-esteem that I needed you to be my moral compass, but it was also because you were holding me straight during a period of my life when all I felt like doing was steering into the rocks to escape from it all. You saved me from destroying myself, but then you went and hit those rocks yourself after running away from me, and I don’t really know what to do with this information.”

“You don’t need to do anything. It’s the past. It’s unimportant.”

“It might be your past, but it’s part of my present if I want your future to involve me,” he says quietly, stalling out her stupid heart. “Either as my friend, my colleague, or as more. All of those things involve me loving you, you know. Enough that I can’t handle finding the Emily I know, seeing the shades of her that I saw tonight, and then watching her go out in a blaze of glory because she mistakenly thinks that the only way she can save people is by dying for them. I’m evidence against that theory.”

“I can’t do it, Spencer,” she chokes out, stuck on everything stunning he’s saying. “You don’t know… I don’t want to spend my life chasing the remnants of this imaginary person I fell in love with, okay? I can’t do that, that’s going to fuck me up even more than I am. You can’t offer me all of this on the foundation of a pretend relationship we had—I can’t do that.”

He slips his hand into hers, still looking at her. This time, it’s her who can’t meet his gaze. “That’s not what I’m offering you,” he tells her. “You’ve got it wrong, Emily. With you, back then? It’s why I never gave you my real name—I never pretended around you, so you knowing my name was dangerous. Nothing about that was false. And there was nothing pretend about how I felt about you. We can be that again—because we’re _alive_ , and here, together. I had to look at myself and realise that I wasn’t strong enough to stand on my own back then in order to accept your help, trusting in that one day I _would_ be—remember the cheque? I accepted your help then. Can you trust me to help you now? In the field and outside of it, Em… I’ve got your back, if you’ll let me.”

She thinks, bizarrely, of the tattoo on her hip he must have seen but hasn’t commented on. And, suddenly, she realises that, after all this time, she’s sitting her beside him and he’s no longer the breakable one.

And she makes the monumental decision to trust him and takes the hand he offers her.


	6. January 12, 2007 – February 7, 2007

_204 16 th Street. January 12, 2007. 21:37._

They decide together that they shouldn’t have sex again; at least, not until Emily has worked through the demons she apparently has tangled up with the concept. Sex with Reid is like a loaded gun for her—it might go off and leave her bleeding, or it could jam and just be okay. Either way, she doesn’t want to risk that dark promise, not when they’re on the cusp of regaining what they’d lost.

Reid suggests therapy.

She politely suggests where he can put that idea, and they don’t mention it again.

He appears on her doorstep one Saturday afternoon with a bag of thrift-shore puzzles and an eager grin. Despite being distrustful about the concept of jigsaws, seeing nothing but tedium in the idea of them, she lets him in and her kitchen table is quickly overtaken by the holographic nightmare that is this five-thousand piece ‘white tiger on snow’ monstrosity. The snow, Emily is horrified to find, glitters and refracts light strangely, which makes it almost impossible to tell if the shades of white and grey match from piece to piece.

“I should burn this and you,” she informs him nine hours into the process when all they have is three and a half paws and what might be a nose, or an eye, or another paw. “What on earth made you think the holographic one was a good idea?”

“It was pretty,” is his only answer, rubbing at his eyes and blinking rapidly. She has no pity for him: her own eyes are seeing glitter everywhere she looks too. “I thought it would be relaxing.”

“There’s nothing relaxing about this…”

He laughs and leans back over, sorting his piles of puzzle pieces into more piles of which she has no idea the purpose of, just lets him do what his nerdy heart desires. And they work in silence for a while, a companionable kind of silence, until Emily’s stomach breaks it with a growl.

“Order in?” he asks without looking up from the puzzle.

“Order in,” she agrees.

It’s only when she’s rifling through the drawer with the brochures in it for the various food outlets near her apartment that it hits her how _normal_ tonight has been. She doesn’t really have friends, never really has, and she hasn’t had a night of doing nothing of importance with someone else since… well, him. This is something she entirely associates with Robert, this quiet enjoying each other’s company, and now, she guesses, Reid too. Further proof that he hasn’t changed at all at his core, despite her doubts.

She wonders if he associates it with her too, walking back over with the procured menus and just standing in the door for a while, watching him work. There’s a flick of hair in his eyes, his expression focused. She watches his hands and how deftly they work, and she eyes the curve of his back under his neat shirt, before he notices her and turns in his chair to smile warmly.

For a second, seeing his smile and his hands and his body turned just so, chin propped on the back of the chair, she regrets having agreed to keep their relationship platonic for now.

“Indian?” he asks, but she’s been completely distracted from food.

“What happened to your friend, Elliot?” she questions, frowning before her memory sharpens. “I mean, Ethan. It was Ethan, right?”

His smile vanishes, fingers curling a little around the wood of the chair.

“I don’t know,” he says, looking away. “We fell out of touch.”

“Oh.”

She stands there for a bit, regretting asking even as she sees all kinds of hurt in the shape of his posture. The pain there is clear. _Something_ happened, and if she was smart she’d leave well enough alone.

She’s never been that smart.

Taking the seat next to him, she lays the menus on one of his neat piles before touching his leg, drawing his gaze back to her. “You should tell me,” she says, earning a frown. “You let things fester if you feel like your emotions about those things are invalid. You’ve always done it—you did it about me leaving, and you did it about your father. You’re probably still doing it about your dad. I’m guessing Ethan left, right? Same as I did?”

“How can you possibly guess that?” he asks.

“Because that’s your weak spot,” she points out gently. “I’ve never seen you as sore as you are when people walk away from you. I think… I think I knew that when I walked out. I think I knew it was the one thing that would ensure you wouldn’t come after me, because you’re so fucked up about it you wouldn’t be able to move beyond that bitterness.”

“That’s me,” he says dryly. “Dr Spencer Reid, PhD in abandonment issues. I don’t see how talking about it will help.”

“You used to tell me how much it hurt that people didn’t understand you. I understood you, enough that I didn’t infantilise or idolise you, and I think that’s why we got along so well. Ethan? Ethan got you and in a way even I couldn’t. I could tell that from the way you talked about him—he was important to you. And if you don’t think talking it out helps, then how the hell am I sitting here beside you?”

He just stares at her, so she plays her trump card.

“If you tell me about Ethan, I’ll tell you about Matthew,” she offers, feeling a shiver work up her spine about opening that part of her life up once more for his perusal, like the anticipation of seeing something terrible when cracking open a crypt or coffin, accompanied by a rush of stale, rotting air. Something like locked away suddenly let out into the light.

“Matthew?” Reid asks curiously, puzzle and food forgotten completely now. “Who was Matthew? A friend? Partner? Sibling?”

But she presses her finger to her lips, raises her eyebrows, and picks up a menu.

“You’ve got until our food arrives to decide,” she informs him. “Ethan for Matthew—that’s the deal. Now, help me pick.”

 

_204 16 th Street. January 12, 2007. 22:34._

“What is this?” he asks, looking up at her as she walks into the living room where he’s portioning their food out for them.

“Get a cushion for your knees,” she tells him, struggling with the awkwardly shaped box she’s carrying to lower it gently to the ground. Ignoring her, he leaps up and helps, following her lead after to help drag the coffee table aside and throw cushions for them to sit upon in front of the space heater. As soon as he’s seated beside her, his plate on his knee and hers beside her, she slips the top from the box and lets him see a glimpse of what’s within: a picture of her at eight dressed in her Communion dress and veil. It’s a box of her past, with all the things she’s been and gone before.

“Oh,” he breathes, reaching a longing hand towards the box. A hand that she catches in hers.

“Ethan,” she reminds him.

He studies her for a moment before rearranged himself on the cushions, making himself more comfortable. “Ethan left,” he says. She doesn’t say anything, just lets him tease his food with his fork as he slowly thinks it over, letting him carefully tread this unsteady ground. “On our first day of the academy. He gave no warning, no goodbye, he just… left.”

“You don’t know why?”

He shakes his head.

“Have you spoken to him since?”

Another head shake. Emily’s heart aches for him, suddenly realising how compounding the heartbreak must have been, Ethan walking out so soon after Emily had done just the same and both of them mirroring William’s path.

“Academy training is hard,” she says gently. “Maybe he realised he couldn’t cut it.”

Reid’s stare is baleful, and she amends that statement as he takes an angry mouthful of rice, shoulders tense.

“Maybe he realised his morals and outlook didn’t align with the FBI,” she offers instead. “There’s a culture…”

“I don’t align with that culture either, and yet here I am,” Reid points out.

“Yeah, but you’re the kind of person who craves a challenge, Spencer. You’ll go where that challenge beckons. To do this work, to be where you are now, that’s your goal and your calling. If you didn’t have that burning desire, would you have fought so hard to get there? You don’t know where Ethan is—maybe he realised his calling was somewhere else.”

“Then why wouldn’t he _tell_ me?” The hurt in Reid’s tone is insurmountable. “I would have supported him, no matter what. I just… I just hate missing people who don’t care enough about me to stay. Alternatively, there’s something inherently wrong within me that drives the people I care about out the door. Either way, I’m tired of it.”

“Maybe he was ashamed,” is all Emily says.

Reid lowers his fork, his food cooling. “I miss him every day,” he says. “A movie comes on that we watched together and I think of him. I find something funny in a book and realise I have no one to tell. My cell is silent unless work beckons, and I go home to an empty home where I’m always taunted by the thought that, no matter how much I need someone, I am utterly and completely alone. He’s gone, just like you were and just like Dad, and all of you keep leaving these terrible voids in my life that seem impossible to fill, overflowing as they are with all the good memories taunting me with what used to be there that isn’t any longer. I don’t believe shame is an excuse for causing me to feel this way. What could he possibly have been that ashamed about that he’d leave rather than tell me?”

She’d only intended to tell him about Matthew, about the drugs and the church, but the words leap from her mouth without her bidding even as her hand reaches for the box and the photo she knows is in there. And as the polaroid appears in her hand like the ghost of Emily past, the three teenagers within it smiling and John’s hand in hers, she says, “I had an abortion.”

His fork clatters and he looks at her, shock and then a horrible kind of panic flushing across his features. “When?” he rasps.

She realises what he’s thinking, stumbling over herself to tell him: “When I was fifteen.”

The relief on his face knocks her flat, some cowardly part of her mind whispering _why would he be so scared of that unless it’s something he secretly wants?_

“I was so lonely, Spence. So lonely… everything you described? That was me. I prided myself on my ability to be alone at every school I was dragged to, just the temporary Ambassador’s daughter, she won’t be here long. But people crawled over themselves to be friends with me at most postings. Since I had the option of company, my choosing to be alone was an act of power and I never felt lonely, until Rome. There, people didn’t care who I was anymore. We were teenagers, we didn’t give a shit about titles and positions of power… and, for the first time, no one wanted to sit beside me or ask to be introduced to my mom. And I was alone, without recompense. And it was horrible. It builds, you know? Week one, it’s an annoyance. One month and you can tolerate it. After three months? After three months you feel like talking to the mice in the walls, or screaming at strangers just to get a reaction… and then John saw me. After months of nothing, he saw me. And I saw him.”

“Oh, Emily,” Reid murmurs, a terrible kind of knowing on his face. She remembers: he was thirteen at college. What did he do to fit in?

“I was such a dumbass. He called and I went and anything he asked me to do, I did. Drugs, alcohol, sex. If he wanted it, I gave it, because you’ll do anything to not be lonely at fifteen, to feel like you matter. And Matthew was there, he was my friend, but he was so quiet about his friendship that, by that point, I didn’t see it so clearly… until I was pregnant and John was gone and Matt was all I had. Two fifteen-year-olds facing something so big, so life-changing. Alone. And I was so ashamed after, so ashamed of what I’d done and what it had cost us both… I never spoke to him again. Every time I looked at him, I remembered what I’d done and it felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin, to peel it off of me like an old scab. And he never complained? I mean, it must have hurt and I know it did because pretty soon after that people began talking about him using, and I mean using. Not recreationally, not anymore. But he never came to me and told me how much he missed me, how much my abandonment of him must have stung, and I don’t know whether that was because he thinks, like you do, that my leaving was a failing on his part, or if it’s because he knew I was ashamed.”

She’s breathing hard when she stops, all of it having gushed out of her in this horrible rush of feeling and emotion she’d thought had been long locked away. But he’s not pulling away from her and he’s not looking disgusted or repulsed by her, instead taking the polaroid away from her and studying it close.

Finally, he speaks.

“I want to turn this back on you,” he says, earning a frown from her as she tries and fails to follow what he’s saying. “I want to say I’ll contact Ethan if you contact Matthew… I don’t know if that’s a good idea, though. I don’t know how destructive knowing the paths our friends have taken will be.”

Emily is quiet for a moment, before carefully offering something she’s not sure she’d have offered if she didn’t think this man beside her might stay there, maybe. Just maybe.

“Deal,” she says. “Matthew for Ethan, right? I’m sure Garcia can find them for us.”

“Deal,” says Spencer. “Now, this box… you are going to let me explore it, right?”

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. January 24, 2007. 18:02._

After the nightmare he’d delivered with the holographic puzzle—now gifted to Garcia, may she enjoy it more than they had—it’s her turn to pick something to do. It’s with a gleeful heart and only a little smugness that she shows up at his apartment this Friday evening with a bag of assorted movies she’d nabbed from a local video store budget bin—none with covers.

“It’s like a lucky dip,” she explains as he sorts through the blank covers with his expression wary. “No looking at the discs—whatever goes on, that’s what we watch.”

She’s a little bit forcing her manic smile, her brain still locked pretty hard on everything that had happened with Morgan on their last case. Things with kids tend to hit harder; cases that turn personal hit harder yet. And Buford’s surety that what he was doing was right… it haunts her, a little, like a reminder that they’re composed of the shadows of their pasts, and that those shadows always leak forward into the present.

Reid seems to understand that, sliding the DVDs back to her, smiling, and offering to make caramel popcorn while she picks the first—barely managing to hold back laughter when he walks back in to the _Elmo in Grouchland_ opening playing.

“The next puzzle I buy will be white on white,” he warns her, nose scrunching a little bit, but then he seems to really get into Elmo’s adventures, so she figures he’s forgiven her. And they’re side by side on his buckled couch, the popcorn between them, arguing over just what exactly classes as a comfort toy for children.

“My chess set was not the nerdy equivalent of Elmo’s blankie,” Reid splutters, looking affronted by the insinuation Emily’s made about it. “It’s an intellectual pursuit that I—”

“Slept with until you were ten?” she teases gently. “Carried everywhere? Loved dearly? Spencer, that’s a comfort item. You had the world’s dorkiest comfort item.”

He grumbles under his breath at her, probably feeling like she’s challenging the magic of his first chess set.

“It’s okay,” she tells him, managing not to laugh. “My comfort item was a rolling pin. I liked hitting things with it and chewing on the end, sometimes at the same time Mom says.”

There’s silence. He stares at her. Even Elmo is silent for a moment.

“I have never been less surprised by something in my life,” he says finally, not even pretending to hide his laughter.

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. January 24, 2007. 23:37._

He’s never going to forgive her for the next movie being the remake of _The Wickerman,_ just like she’s probably never going to forgive herself for the following one being _The Birds._ At least Hitchcock is a hit with Reid, for all that Emily is bored out of her mind throughout it. By the end of that, they’ve hit that point in the night where they need to end it or commit.

“I should go home,” she says, noting that—with the popcorn finished and the empty bowl moved to the coffee table with their drinks and the remote—they’re now sitting side by side with his thigh a warm line all down hers. “If I stay any longer, I’m going to be too tired to drive.”

“Mm,” he hums, opening the bag of DVDs and looking in. “We still have two left…”

They look at each other, Emily’s heart beating a little faster as his eyes flicker to her mouth and he leans forward a little before pulling back. Uncertainty traces his features for a second, like the lean forward had been entirely unconscious, and she swallows hard and tries not to stare at his mouth in return.

“I normally sleep on the couch anyway,” he says, looking back down into the bag with his cheeks burning. “You could stay in my bed, and I probably have some pyjamas to fit you.”

It’s a dumb idea, really, because she has no self-control and doesn’t know if she trusts his, but she also doesn’t really want to leave. The sun is down outside, no light leaking in through the curtains anymore, and she’s kind of curious about what else the bag of wonders has to offer them. Plus, with every movie they’ve inched a little closer and she’s also curious about whether that will continue.

“Better make some more popcorn,” she says, with her hammering heart almost giving her away.

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. January 25, 2007. 01:07._

She’s wearing his thickest flannel pyjamas, rolled up three times at the leg and twice at the arm. They’ve gathered blankets and piled them on, the space heater no longer doing enough to chase away the January chill, and they now resemble two baby birds with their heads poking out the nest of blankets watching the TV screen curiously. It’s _Poltergeist,_ which she’s never seen and he has and isn’t anywhere near as boring as she’d expected, especially with his quiet narration of everything he knows about the movie and with his hand under the blankets rubbing her leg gently.

She’s a little sleepy by this point, the movie dragging on and warm enough that it’s making her dozy. His voice is a comforting hum beside her that she finds herself drifting towards as she nods off, twitching awake to find that she’s curled on her side with her head cushioned on his chest and his arms around her, his chin brushing her hair. In that half-awake state, it feels like the warmest, safest space in the world, and she rolls towards him and burrows her face into that warm chest as he readjusts the blankets tighter around her.

“Don’t let the case reports run,” she distantly hears someone who sounds like her saying, his chest shifting rapidly as he swallows down a startled laugh. “Gideon will yell…”

“I’ll do my best,” he responds in a husky voice, her feeling him lean down and press his mouth to her hair. “I’ll be here when you wake, Em.”

In that second, she loves him.

From his startled inhale of breath, she might have said that out loud.

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. January 25, 2007. 02:35._

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to bed?” he’s asking, watching her feed the last DVD into the player. “You were very asleep just before. And sleep-talking.”

“Ridiculous,” she tells him with a roll of her eyes. “I was resting my eyes. And I don’t sleep-talk.”

“Uhuh,” he says as she re-joins him on the couch. He’s now lying down too, wiggling back against the couch so she can lie in front of him, appreciating the blanket over them and his warmth behind her even more as the chill of the apartment fades from her toes. “I have my doubts you’ll last through this movie.”

“Sure I will,” she responds, gratified by the title that comes up. “Oh! _Enemy at the Gates,_ I like this one!”

“Oh goodie,” he mutters. “Historical inaccuracies galore, I’m sure.”

“Don’t be such a pessimist. Just enjoy the movie, damnit.” When that earns her a level stare from him, she elbows him gently in the chest, wiggling her cold toes from where they’re buried between his legs. “One word out of you, and I’m putting Elmo on again.”

That works. He’s quiet throughout the movie, doing nothing but breathing lightly behind her with his hand tracing gentle lines up her sides. It’s a battle but, determined to prove him wrong, she manages to stay awake as the night moves on at a slow crawl, his hand on her side getting heavier and his weight behind her heavier as he huddles close. By a certain point, his body against her becomes distracting, his breathing turning deep and slow.

When she peers back at him, his eyes are open but he’s blinking slowly, mouth slightly open. Very close to asleep.

It shudders through her, looking at his slack mouth, how much she wants to kiss him right then. Turning back to the movie and feeling him burrow back close, that mouth now close enough that there are gentle puffs of warm air touching the back of her neck, she can’t focus anymore. On the screen, things are happening but she has no idea what part of the movie they’re at, or what’s coming up, her entire brain suddenly locked onto the rhythmic thrum of his life behind her. It’s a warmth that’s unrelated to the blankets and his body heat. It’s a warmth entirely bound in his smile and her vulnerability to that smile, a warmth that teases through her body and leaves her feeling reckless and coiled, a waiting heat. Her brain locked onto the concept of him leaning forward just that little bit more and kissing at the back of her neck, tracing the bumps of her spine with his mouth, his hand slipping under this over-sized pyjama top to touch skin to skin.

She shakes herself, shoving it off and focusing again on the movie—realising abruptly that it’s _that_ scene and thinking back with a thrum of remembering the first time she’d watched this movie, locked in an empty room with nothing but a battered laptop as her and Tsia did a hard month of surveillance. The laptop hadn’t had anything on it except solitaire and five pirated movies of various quality, and she distantly remembers Tsia crying over the sex scene before declaring it heartbreaking. All Emily had thought as she’d watched it was to reflect on how vulnerable the sex had made them both, the characters involved, and to guiltily shove aside memories of Robert.

The room is utterly silent except for the soft murmurs from the TV, as Vasily desperately tries to smother Tania’s gasps. Even Reid behind her seems to be holding his breath, caught in the strange, haunting feeling of the scene. She wonders if he’s as struck by it as Tsia had been, and if she’s the broken one here for feeling nothing but apathy and a little side of distaste for the humanity of it.

A second later, she frowns. He’s moved behind her, sitting up a little as though to stretch his back after so long curled against her—which would be fine, but it’s leaving her back open to the cold.

“What are you doing?” she asks, trying to wiggle back against him and feeling him inch away.

“Nothing,” he replies in his ‘lying’ voice. She rolls her eyes. Weirdo.

“Get back down here, it’s freezing,” she tells him grouchily. “I swear, Spence, don’t make me come over there—”

With slow, careful movements, he’s obeyed.

It takes a second for her to realise, hiding her startled laugh by turning her mouth into the pillow they’re sharing, before turning a little to look at him. By the look on his face, he knows she knows.

“I gotta ask,” she teases gently, “is the boner in honour of Jude Law or Rachel Weisz?”

He doesn’t answer, just turns his own face into the pillow and makes a noise like he’s dying of the shame, which, incidentally, seems to have no effect on his very eager dick digging into her ass.

“You’re a child,” she hears him mumbling into the pillow. “It’s an unconscious physical response to arousal, I can’t always help it. And it’s _not_ a hint to me finding unhygienic World War Two era sexual escapades in a room full of sleeping soldiers arousing.”

“Say what you want, I think you’ve got a kink.” With some fumbling, she manages to turn over on the couch until they’re chest to chest, using her hand to slip under the cheek he has pressed to the pillow to try lever him out of his shamed burrowing. “Hey, don’t look so embarrassed. Random movie crushes out of nowhere are fun. And nothing can be as wild as my first.”

“Your first movie crush or the first movie character you become unexpectedly aroused by?” he queries, drawn out of his shell by the curiosity about her life that never seems to flag.

“Both,” she admits, leaning close and whispering, “Come here, it’s a secret.” He chuckles, but obeys as she slides even closer, her legs lined against his and his semi now pressed to her thigh as she curls a hand around his ear and leans close to whisper, “It was Robin Hood. The _Disney_ version.”

His startled hiss of laughter is gratifying, body shaking against her as evidence of him attempting to hold it back. “The _fox?”_ he splutters.

“Hey, he’s a sexy fox, what can I say? Disney knows exactly what they’re doing with their voice actors, too, by the way—don’t tell me you didn’t get a little tingly when Simba used his adult voice for the first time in Hakuna Matata.”

He’s now laughing too hard to respond, just shaking his head at her. It has the unfortunate effect of making her bump her mouth against his ear—she doesn’t know why she does it, just that it felt right at the time, but she catches the lobe with her teeth and gently sucks before letting go. Immediately, she’s gratified by the great gallop of his heart against her chest, the laughter cut off into a startled exhale and his dick surging against her.

“Em,” he says in a voice that sounds like he’s trying to warn her off but the effect diminished by the way come out like a moan. “Oh god, Emily…” follows, as she obeys her stupid brain’s urging and kisses down the line of his jaw until she reaches his mouth and they’re suddenly making out fiercely. When they break apart, he’s panting. “We said we weren’t going to have sex.”

“That doesn’t rule out getting off,” she says back, her arousal washing over her in waves with every thump of his body against her, from his heart to his cock.

“I think it might,” he breathes, closing his eyes and letting his head loll back as he tries to gather himself. “Maybe we should go to bed. Separately.”

“Oh,” she says, barely managing not to lick a line up that exposed skin. “Yeah, probably… smart. One thing?”

“Yeah?”

“I told you my embarrassing movie turn-on,” she says quickly, hoping this sudden topic change will dull the fire a bit—and not being overly surprised when it doesn’t, even as his eyes pop open and he stares warily at her. “Fair play, you have to tell me yours. And this _doesn’t_ count. Sex scenes and Jude Law are inherently erotic.”

He’s quiet for long enough that she doesn’t think he’s going to answer, stunned when he does. Beckoning her closer, he does exactly as she had—cupping his hand around her ear and leaning close in a mock representation of imparting some great knowledge. It’s a little more heated this time, with his breath coming fast and warm against her ear and doing nothing to help her burning arousal.

And when he whispers, “I once got turned on by the docking scene in _Interstellar_ ,” sure, she laughs because _who wouldn’t_ , but that’s nothing compared to how much she wants him in that second, dangerously aware of what he could do to her if he gives in like she did.

But he doesn’t.

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. January 25, 2007. 02:50._

He walks her into the bedroom to show her to her bed, which she tells him is unneeded but he seems determined to do anyway. Watching him try to arrange pillows for her comfort, flicking the covers restlessly as he stands beside the bed, she wishes he was coming with her. But she knows he won’t, and so doesn’t ask.

He turns, seeing her standing there and stopping mid-offer of making breakfast. It’s such a stunned inhale of air that she knows he’s been distracted by some wild thought, wondering what it is for only a second before deciding to ask.

“What are you thinking?” she asks. “You’ve got this weird look.”

“Of kissing you,” he says with such bluntness that she knows she’s worn down his careful barriers today. Kissing isn’t sex, she rationalises, and so walks boldly towards him and uses her palm against his cheek to guide his mouth down to hers. He obeys. The first kiss is chaste, just touching gently and his smile flavouring it.

So she kisses him again, her fingers curling against his cheek, and his arm comes up to wrap around her and pull her close. It goes from chaste to fired up in seconds, a gasp of air from his mouth turning into a muffled moan as she teases his lips open and slips her tongue in in an effort to draw him to her completely. His hand is smoothing up and down her spine, his whole body coiling tight as she pulls away from his mouth and dips down to lick along his collarbone. Suddenly, his hands are lifting her by her ass, her toes tipped up so she can move with him, and he’s kissing her so hungrily that she’s pretty sure he’s using his tongue as a stand in for his cock. They barely break apart to breathe and her desire to feel him surmounts as her hand skims down to spread over his crotch, finding a hard line of heat and the suggestion of a damp patch of cotton there to welcome her.

“Little tease,” she hisses with the dizzying jolt that starts in her chest and fans outward at the feel of that damp patch. “You’re not wearing underwear, are you?”

“Not when I sleep,” he responds, looking at her with the kind of glazed arousal that means half his brain is in his pants right now. Despite this, she knows he’s still sharper than he looks and doubts that she can coax him into stupidity with her—although not from lack of trying.

“I’m jealous,” she murmurs, drawing him down again with her free hand so she can hum it into his ear as she nips at the lobe, his knees slightly buckled both to allow her access and because this always makes him weak, teasing him like this. “Figured it would be rude to go commando in your clothes… I normally don’t wear anything to bed.”

He swallows, turning his head to kiss at her throat, her turn to be at an awkward angle to account for height differences. “I don’t mind,” he says, his voice the fucked-out kind of husky. “I want you to be comfortable.”

Incredulous, she shakes her head at him. “Are you actually going to sleep on the couch after inviting me to be naked in your bed? That’s a whole new level of sexual tension, buddy, just saying. That’s not going to bother you at all?”

“Oh, it’s going to bother me.” The shiver he gives against her is delicious, as is the way his hips are bumping gently against the hand she’s still stroking him with through his pants, feeling that wet spread below her fingers. “I’m going to be thinking about it all night, tempted by it. But we agreed, and any decision I make now is going to be affected by how much I currently want to have sex with you.”

“Christ,” she breathes before realising that she needs to stand down now or else they’re going to regret this tomorrow. He’s not wrong—neither of them are working with full functions right now. “I think I should go to bed now. And you to couch. And we should definitely stop touching.”

“Yes,” he rasps, staying against her for a second before stepping away and leaving her cold and aroused and nervous. “Yeah, right. Of course. Uh, goodnight… Emily.”

“Night, Spencer,” she chokes out, and then he’s gone.

 

_23/35 E Street Northwest. January 25, 2007. 03:13._

It’s the scent of his shampoo on his pillows that fucks her up. Going to bed already horny only to find herself surrounded by him turns out to be an exercise in frustration, curling on her side around one of those pillows with her nose buried in it and the heat between her hips throbbing hot. All she can think about is that damnable patch of wet cotton and how he’d breathed against her.

She wonders what he’s doing out there in the silent apartment, the door between them open but the room dark enough that she can’t see him from here. She wonders what she’s thinking, staring at that shadowy doorway until the thought of it is killing her and she ends up reaching for her cell and sending off a stupid text asking him if he’s awake.

He responds instantly, the tell-tale glow of a screen in the next room giving away that he’s awake as blankets rustle after the message alert pings. _Yes,_ his text reads.

She sends back _Can’t sleep? Thinking deep thoughts?_ and buries her mouth back into the pillow, trying to pretend she isn’t staring at the screen as the glow lights up the next room again. No message tone this time: he’s muted it.

His reply when it comes doesn’t help that she’s halfway to fucking herself with her own fingers just to take the edge off. _Wondering whether you actually decided to sleep naked._

Emily wonders about the events that led her to this moment, about three texts away from sexting her colleague because they’re both too stubborn to give in to the inevitable. And the text she sends reflects that inevitability: _I did._

She very clearly hears him whisper, “Fuck,” from the next room, muffling her laugh into the pillow.

And her cell hums next to her, the text within slamming home any doubts she’d had about whether or not he’s done this before. _I think you should know, since we’re already sexually active together and since it would be hypocritical of me to suggest otherwise—I don’t mind if you masturbate in my bed._

She reads it five times, pretty sure she’s hallucinating. And that he’s not great at sexting although, maybe he’s better than she gives him credit for since it effectively gets her going. And maybe she’d have sat there continuing to read it blankly, if another message hadn’t pinged in.

_In fact, I’m kind of relying on the imagery of you doing just that._

Her shocked inhale only brings more of his scent into her mouth, curling tighter against the pillow and dreamily obeying that unspoken command. She’s not even surprised to find that she’s already worked up enough for three fingers, closing her eyes and thinking of the first time they’d had sex, how he’d felt sliding tentatively into her. She muffles her heavy breathing into the pillow, gasping into it as her thumb presses to her clit, arching into that touch as her brain chokes up an image of him fucking his hand barely five feet from her.

It’s too quick. Barely a minute after she begins, torn between the memory of sex with him and the reality of the night and with her hand teasing her and the pillow there as something to brace herself against, she’s climaxing with a shiver and a choked breath.

The silence of the apartment as she shivers to a quiet peak is broken by what’s very clearly a moan that’s not hers. It’s barely even a moan, more of a drawn-out breath, and she can hear a whisper of her name in it. Husky and hoarse and on the cusp of sated.

The effect is electric, feeling herself tighten around her fingers as she comes again, squeezing her eyes shut and bracing hard against the pillow, feeling the damp patch from where she’s been breathing hard into it against her cheek. It’s with almost an ecstatic kind of desire that she isn’t quiet in that moment; despite how long she’s lived alone, it’s still a delicious sin to verbalise her unaccompanied pleasure. His name slips from her mouth, slow and drawn out, and she doesn’t muffle it. She wonders if he’s come yet as her body coils tight and then, slowly, relaxes. The ache of wanting more than just her fingers fades, leaving her still breathing fast, her hearing locked on waiting for more noise.

It’s her bladder kicking back in following her arousal that drives her out of the bed, making sure her feet thump on the carpet so he knows she’s up. Naked and shivering with the cold, her sticky hand curled against her chest so she doesn’t accidentally touch anything, she pads out into the living room with every sense hyperaware of the focused silence on the couch. With her eyesight adjusted to the gloom, she can make out his shape under the blankets and see the glint of his open eyes watching her.

Despite coming twice, there’s a whisper of her arousal at how he’s lying there, her brain very able to picture what he’s doing under the covers. It’s a feeling like being open and exposed all over again, and that’s why she doesn’t speak as she walks through and up the hall to the bathroom.

In there, once finished, she washes her hands and sits on the rim of the bath, feeling all kinds of fucked out considering she hasn’t actually gotten laid tonight. Her expression in the mirror is pale with her hair wild, eyes locked on herself and still feeling uncomfortably warm between her legs despite having cleaned up.

There’s a gentle tap on the door which she answers with something, she’s not sure what, but he takes it as permission and slips in. Naked too, and shivering with the cold the same as she is, he edges in nervously before slipping over to wash his hands.

When he sits beside her, hissing a bit at how cold the rim of the bath is, they don’t say anything for a moment. She stares at his bare legs beside her, sneaking a glance to his lap where his dick is both clearly soft and unhappily cold, before wondering what this says about them both that they’re both so open with each other while also closing each other out at the same time.

She speaks first. “We’re so fucked up together,” she says glumly, leaning her head on his warm shoulder.

“We always have been,” he responds without missing a beat. “I think it’s why we work so well.”

She agrees, closing her eyes and treasuring the moment, thinking that maybe they’re finally starting to find each other.

 

_February 7, 2007_

It’s a text from Garcia that she wants to talk to him about in private despite the difficulty of doing that in the middle of a case that drives her to volunteer to go with him in JJ’s place out to question a man about some dogs. The car ride there is long, Emily driving and Reid circling back over the details of the case over and over again as he tries to find new angles to examine it at.

“So, uh,” Emily says, glancing quickly at the GPS as the city around them gives up completely, turning into darkened rural roads that she’ll get lost in fast if she’s not careful, even with Mr Maps in the seat beside her. “Garcia texted me.”

“Oh?” Reid asks, looking up at her from the case file he has open on his lap, using his cell as a light. “About the case?”

“No,” Emily says. Her hands tighten a little on the steering wheel. “She found Ethan.”

Reid is very quiet, his fingers flat on the file and his gaze locked on it despite her being sure he’s not reading it anymore. Finally, he speaks: “And Matthew?”

Emily swallows. The answer is ‘yes’, but she’s not sure…

“So, Ethan’s in New Orleans,” she says with false cheer, making sure to keep her eyes on the, now unsealed, road. Why this guy has to live in ass-fuck nowhere, she has no idea. Good luck getting cell reception out here, or decent coffee. “He’s a jazz musician there. Garcia thinks he’s doing pretty well for himself, from what she found. Public records only, though, since it’s not exactly playing well to do a deep dive on old friends. And she has a contact number.”

“A contact number that you have?” Reid asks. He doesn’t seem surprised when she nods. “I see. And Matthew?”

He never lets her evade.

“Him too,” she says quietly. “Not so good, though.” When Reid doesn’t say anything, she takes the plunge. “Rehab. In the States. In and out for the last ten years, currently in. No contact.”

“I’m sorry, Emily.”

That’s all he says, but he does sound genuinely sorry so she shrugs.

“It is what it is,” she’s careful to say, making sure none of her complicated feelings about this slip out in her tone. “I can’t hold myself responsible for the life of a boy I knew almost two decades ago.”

“But you do, even though you shouldn’t.” Reid touches her knee, a gentle touch that reassures her despite herself, and she gives him a smile in return. “Is this the place?”

Emily pulls in, gravel crunching under the tires as the headlights illuminate a battered house with a barn looming behind in the night, corn fields waving behind that. “It looks joyful,” she comments. “Come on, let’s go see what he has to say.”

“Not going to leave me in the car?” Reid teases, earning a level stare. “I’m kidding, Em, jeez.”

“Keep kidding like that and I’ll leave you here to walk home,” she warns him. “Honestly, I should have traded you in for JJ. At least she’s better company.”

Ten minutes later, she thinks again of this comment.

They click onto who Hankel is within seconds of each other, both turning back to look at the closed door between him and them with, for Emily, a buzz of adrenaline and a wary acceptance that this is how the night is going to go: they’re stuck out here with a serial killer and all she has to rely on is Spencer Reid.

“He’s going around back!” Reid says, darting from her side to give chase. Swearing under her breath, she hurtles after him. “Come on, we can cut him off. Hotch knows where we are—he’ll come looking for us!”

“Cool down,” she snaps. “Get behind me, now. Keep your gun low. No running off, got it?”

He gives her a frustrated stare as they pace each other to the barn where Hankel sprinted into. Emily eyes the doors.

“What if I go around—” he begins.

“Do _not_ ,” she snaps, taking one side of the barn door and jerking her head at him to take the other before inching it open very slightly. “No splitting up,” she mouths at him, her heart sinking when she sees his gun in his hands. It makes her own palms clammy, her heart thud hard: he’s her partner and a field agent, just the same as her, but all she can see right now is Robert and how bad this could go if he gets hurt. The same doe-eyed vulnerability.

There’s a low growl from the other side of the door, mirrored by another. A dog, maybe more. Emily lets go of the door, letting it drift gently shut and backing up as the latch engages. Reid shrugs at her, looking frustrated, but she takes off at a steady jog around the building. She doesn’t want to waste ammo on dogs, not when focusing on them could give Hankel the opportunity to sneak up on them.

“Emily, _wait,”_ Reid hisses, grabbing her arm.

“No, you wait,” she hisses back, furious with him. “Stop trying to overrule me, Spencer! I’m more experienced than you and he’s dangerous—Hotch isn’t going to realise we’re gone for hours and it takes another two to drive out here. What do you think this guy can do to us in that amount of time? If he gets away, he gets away—we know who he is now and we know he’s devolving, he can’t hide for long, but we do _not_ put ourselves in a position where you—”

A door bangs at the back of the barn, both of them looking just in time to see a shape vanish into the cornfield. Emily swears. There’s no way to keep their sights clear in there, no way to keep track of what’s approaching around them. As soon as they enter the thick stalks, they’ll lose vision and they’ll lose location, and they’ll lose the advantage. It’s a deadly position without SWAT at their backs and sides, with Hankel more familiar with the area and easily able to circle them.

But two is still safer than one.

She makes a choice.

“Stay behind me, we’ll flank him,” she says, a sick churning in her gut telling her that this is wrong, that she needs to get Reid out of here—but she also knows that, despite her assurances, if Hankel leaves here he’ll kill others before they catch him again. She’s not ready to let that happen.

“Side by side would be safer,” Reid says after a moment, clearly moderating his tone to hide irritation with her. “You’ll be in my line of fire on point.”

“He’s not going to come at us from the front,” she responds. God, he’s green. This is going to get them both killed; it’s right now that she realises that she doesn’t trust him an inch to get them out of here.

And then they’re in the cornfield, moving quickly and quietly and hoping that they haven’t lost him already.

When she hears the arguing, it’s with a low kick in her gut. There’s more than one Unsub—and they’re both here. She can hear multiple voices, glancing over at Reid’s face and finding him realising much the same. That means they lose their only advantage: numbers.

She’s stubborn, but she’s not stupid. She steps back, waving her hand at Reid in a clear _go back_ gesture.

He shakes her head. Emily widens her eyes at him, gesturing harder.

He side-steps her and walks slowly forward, only glancing back once to see if she’s following with a stubborn kind of anger on his face.

She’s going to fucking kill him. If the Unsubs don’t, she will. She’s going to—

He’s still in sight of her when the blow falls, slamming hard into the side of her skull and sending her sprawling with a shocked expulsion of air. She can’t see through the starburst of pain, can’t hear through her head ringing, all she knows is that she’s in the dirt and she’s let go of her gun.

When her vision clears, she tries to stand and vomits instead, rolling over and freezing to find a gun barrel staring down at her. There’s a long beat of waiting as her hearing slowly thumps back in, turning her head very slowly away from that black eye to find Reid standing with his weapon trained on the man behind the gun. Something wet trickles down her neck.

“Just lower your weapon,” Reid is coaxing, his gaze never drifting to her. Through the pounding headache she’s battling, she’s proud of him for that. Never let them see how high the stakes are. “Tobias, you don’t need to do this.”

“You don’t understand,” Hankel says with the same terrified misery in his tone, before it abruptly deepens. Becomes cruel and snarling, like a dog about to bite, as he spits out, “She has to die,” in a voice that isn’t his at all.

Fuck, thinks Emily as she tries to look for her gun without making it obvious. None of them had seen this coming.

“She doesn’t have to die,” Reid says. “No one else has to die. You can stop this now—”

“If you don’t drop your gun, boy, I’m going to blow her brains out right here,” says Hankel in that same deep voice.

To speak would be insurmountably stupid right now, plus Emily thinks she might have bitten her tongue when he’d hit her and isn’t entirely sure she _can_ talk right now, but she’s never wanted to tell Reid to ignore an order more than that moment. She settles for staring at him, trying to say with her eyes how much he definitely should _not_ put his gun down.

But he does. “You don’t want to kill us,” he says, kicking his gun away and holding his hands out by his sides to show they’re empty. “We’re not sinners. You only kill sinners, right? Well, Agent Prentiss and I haven’t done anything wrong—to kill us would be a sin in itself. There’s nothing righteous about murdering us right now, Tobias.”

Hankel cocks his head as though he’s thinking that through. Emily tries to inch closer to her gun and almost vomits again, her brain still spinning. The dirt and broken stalks under her are wet, damp-smelling, and it’s only adding to her nausea.

“You’re right,” Hankel says in his own voice. For a second, Emily hopes. “But everyone is a sinner, if given the chance to confess. I can make you confess.”

Reid’s eyes flicker from Hankel to her as she tries to force her sluggish brain into reading the meaning underlying that. “Okay,” Reid says quietly, earning a dazed frown from her. “Okay. We can do that. I’ll go with you so you can make me confess and we leave Agent Prentiss here. You can’t take us both, and you can’t kill her without evidence of her corruption. I’ll even come quietly.”

Emily’s world spins to a very sudden stop. She knows what he’s doing: he’s assuming that he’s smart enough to talk his way out of captivity, that he’s better at talking Unsubs down than she is. That he has a better chance of surviving being taken by Hankel than she does.

There’s not a single part of her that thinks he’s right, watching with horror as Hankel agrees and approaches Reid, going for his cuffs. He’s offering himself up like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter, throat happily bared to be cut if it means hers isn’t—and her entire being rebels against the idea of that. She can’t let this happen. She can’t let Hankel walk out of here with Robert with him; he’ll never survive, and that will be on her and her failure to protect yet another person she loves.

As soon as Hankel’s back is turned, while he’s focused on cuffing Reid, she dives for her gun.


	7. 63 Hours

_1 hour 13 minutes._

She wakes to distant voices. People around her, leaning over her. Lights and sounds… at first, she thinks she can hear Hotch calling her name and tries to lean towards him; seconds later, it’s JJ with a flashlight calling out for her to tell them where she is.

“I’m here,” she rasps, smelling the cornfield thick and earthy in her nose, the damp of the ground still seeping through her pants. “I’m here, I’m here… I’m here.”

It takes a monumental effort to tear her eyes open, something sticky and half-dry gluing them shut. It hurts. It hurts…

And then her eyes are open and she sees clearly. She sees the wall across from her; she sees the cabin surrounding. When she looks down, she sees the ties binding her tight to the chair that she’s slumped in. She sees that she’s alone and that there’s no light here to be found.

She sees just how much trouble she’s in.

“Fuck,” she chokes out through her crushing headache, just one thought surmounting over all else: if she’s here, captive… where’s Spencer?

 

_9 hour 43 minutes._

Hankel watches her. Despite all her training and her experience in the field, she’s not as good at Reid is at connecting with the truly broken. If it was Reid in this seat, she can’t help but think he’d likely know the words to worm his way into the mind of the man holding him captive. He’d know the cleverest way to talk his way out of here, since she’s always been better at shooting her way out of trouble but that’s hard to do when disarmed, concussed, and chained to a chair.

“Tell me about yourself,” Hankel says suddenly, almost buckling her down the middle as she remembers the last person to ask this of her, under such vastly different circumstances. “Tell me why you’ve become the person sitting here before me.”

“I’m not giving you the ammunition to shoot me,” she snaps back. He’s pacing around her and she can’t watch him the whole way around, neck aching as she strains it to try and keep him in view. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it. Don’t fuck around trying to validate murder.”

He stops and looks at her with something so focused in his expression that she almost reels back. It’s nothing like Doyle—there’s none of the fantastic intelligence there, instead, all she can see is a fanatical kind of zeal. But, in the end, they’re as deadly as each other.

“Are you devout, girl?” Hankel asks with one of his other voices, the one that’s hateful and spitting. “Do you pray for absolution?”

“Yes,” she lies. “Your God is mine. We’re the same, you and I—”

Reid would never have lied like this.

But Hankel snarls, moving like a dog and cutting her off as his hand wraps through her hair and yanks her back hard against the chair, neck pulled back and throat bared. It’s a viciously vulnerable position, and Emily tries to breathe shallowly as every part of her rebels against the way her spine is twisted.

“Get your hands off of me,” she snarls, trying to twist so that her chest isn’t thrust out with the angle he’s yanking her head back at. She sees the way his gaze skims down her, nothing but repulsion in his eyes as he studies her body.

“‘Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die’,” he murmurs, her blood running cold at the remembered line of Ecclesiasticus from the Catholic Bibles of her childhood, the churches that had cast her aside. “‘Give me any plague, but the plague of the heart, and any wickedness but the wickedness of a woman’. We are nothing alike, girl. You revel in your whoredom in your attempt to live like a man in a man’s world. You debase yourself.”

He’s going to kill her, she knows this completely in that moment. If he doesn’t find a reason, this will be it. That she’s a woman in a position of power over him, an equal with men, and he’s repulsed by that.

She stops playing nice, refusing to be kind to the man who’s going to end her.

“My team is going to find you,” she says quietly, going still and hate-filled in his grip. “And if I’m not alive when they do, they’ll make sure you spend the rest of your days on this earth in just as much misery as you will be when you finally burn in Hell.”

He tilts his head and stares right at her, not a flicker of emotion in his eyes. The hate is gone, as is the anxious neuroticism of the Tobias personality. Instead, there’s nothing. Emotionless apathy. And, when he speaks, his voice is chilling enough that she feels it in her bones, the tenor resonating into her through his hand still gripping her hair and raising bumps of fear on every inch of her chilled flesh.

“Let the women learn in silence with all subjection,” he cites with that same deadpan apathy, letting go of her hair and reaching down to undo his belt without breaking eye contact. That simple move guts her. She freezes like the lamb she’d likened Spencer to, thinking of the knife coming her way. The sound of the belt slithering through the loops of his jeans is, somehow, less frightening than the sight of him undoing the belt had been. In some way, realising he only plans to beat her is a hell of a lot kinder than the alternative.

Another part of her is almost disappointed. To rape her, he’d have to untie her, and she’ll go down fighting with her teeth in his throat and his death in her eyes.

And he’s still talking in that same dead voice as he snaps the belt taut and stands above her. “But I suffer not a woman to teach—” The belt falls across her thigh, first one and then another with the tail end slashing her bound arms between them, with a sound like pure noise; she does not flinch. “—nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”

Down comes the belt again, across the same place. And again. She’s thankful that he’s left her pants on her, the material taking the edge from the blow.

The next strike falls across her chest, and this time she jerks with the pain. But she does not scream.

“For Adam was first formed, then Eve.”

Again. This time, when he pulls his hand back, she feels something wet beginning to trickle down her skin.

But she does not scream. And she doesn’t look away. Let him look her in the eyes as he hurts her. Let him carry this too, along with every other act he’s undertaken.

“And Adam was not deceived—” The blow to her face is shocking, and she knows instantly that it’s fucked her mouth up for sure, but as soon as the stars have faded she merely cocks her head again and stares him down, seeing him pause for just a second before continuing: “—but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”

And when he finally stops, she gathers together her shaken wits, smiles at him, and then spits the blood from her broken mouth into his face, watching with satisfaction as it drips from his chin.

“Try harder,” she sneers. “You can’t break me, and I’ll kill you if you try.”

After all, he’s no Doyle.

 

_11 hours 59 minutes._

Hankel vanishes for what Emily estimates is just over an hour, leaving her alone with offal burning on the wood-stove behind her. The stink is revolting but she’s smelled worse, putting it aside as just another thing she’s going to survive and move on from. In that time, she fights her bonds as much as she can, until the blood from her wrists is running just as freely as from her fucked up mouth. When that fails, she tries to shuffle the chair towards the door, the legs grating and complaining on the cement floor beneath her. But it’s locked and she can’t stand properly to reach it with her hands tethered to the chair how they are.

There’s nothing else in this cramped hovel. Gravestones propped against the back wall that she looks at for a while, noting their unmarked faces on the freshly hewn stone. A cemetery then, or a stone-smith. Either way, she tucks the information away just in case.

There are more computers set up in the alcove at the front of the cabin, the screens powered down but with the occasional LED light blinking. Dragging the chair over there earns her nothing but more blank screens, none of them waking to her jolting the desk with her shoulder. By this point, her lashed legs are screaming with pain, her eyes watering from the agony of the stripes across her chest and tits, and she barely manages to get the chair back in place before sagging into it with her head spinning and a migraine that she knows is going to fuck her up building steadily.

The door opens and she turns to sneer at Hankel as he walks in, making sure he feels the absolute hatred she has for him. He stops, looking at her strangely. When she follows his gaze, her red shirt is marked with smears and spreading pools of blood.

“Did my father do that to you?” Tobias asks with what genuinely sounds like wretchedness in his voice. “I’m sorry. He can be… cruel.”

Emily thinks fast. The voice he’d used while striking her hadn’t been cruel—it hadn’t really been anything. “I don’t think so,” she says carefully. “The man who did this didn’t seem to feel any kind of emotion. I don’t think he understands cruelty, not like we do. And we do, don’t we, Tobias?”

Hankel swallows. His arms are full of wood, which he puts down by the door before walking over to her with short, nervous steps. “Raphael,” he murmurs, but refuses to expand on that thought when she asks who that is. “Father is only cruel to us to teach us what we need to know, to be pious and good and to avoid sin.”

“You know that’s not true. Abuse isn’t teaching—abuse is abuse. This is abuse.” And she takes a wild guess that she doesn’t really feel is all that wild, not with how his eyes never really meet hers and the way he winces and twists away from her regard. “He’s been abusing you for a long time, Tobias. You know, we can help stop that… we can keep him away from you.”

“No one can keep him away from me,” is all Hankel says with a kind of fatalistic resignation that she can’t quite feel sorry for him for, not through the pain. When he reaches down as though to touch where one of the places the belt split her skin is still bleeding, she can’t help but flinch away. His hand draws back. “I can’t clean those. I can’t place my hand upon you in such an intimate way, it wouldn’t be right…”

“You can let me go,” she coaxes. “Isn’t that a kind of repentance? It would be good of you to release me—your God would want you to let me go, so I can go seek help for my injuries. Maybe you can even come, hey? Away from here, away from him?”

Hankel reels back, shaking his head with a ferocious kind of fear. “He warned me,” he breathes. “He warned me the serpent would speak through your tongue, beguiling me.”

“I’m not—”

“No!” Hankel whirls away from her, carding his trembling hands through his hair, and Emily falls silent. She doesn’t want to push him into taking on his father’s voice, or ‘Raphael’s’, not when she’s barely managing to move beyond the pain of what’s happened to her. There’s a dangerous amount of compartmentalising going on in her brain right now: pushing aside everything that isn’t immediate. She refuses to think about her team or about Spencer or whether he’s alive or about dying, not right now. That will cripple her. But Hankel is coming back, kneeling by her side in one smooth movement with the belt that’s still stained with her blood in his hands. “I can help, though. This helps me, and it will help you. I promise, it will help.”

Her confusion lasts until he slips the belt around her arm, pulls it tight, and then fumbles for the bottle in his pocket. It takes until he uncaps the syringe for her to fully realise what he’s about to do to her.

There’s no compartmentalising how she feels in that moment. It’s absolute, raw, inescapable horror. To control her body like he does right now is one thing.

But her mind?

Entirely another.

“Don’t,” she breathes, watching the clear serum fill the syringe with a hypnotic kind of horror. “Don’t do that to me. Don’t, no no no, no no!”

She screams the last, finally—after all her attempts to stay stoic and firm—losing control. Kicking against the chair and screaming at him until her throat feels like it’s tearing and her arm is pulled so tight against the chair that the needle rips the skin as it bites in hard.

But he does. He takes her control from her. He takes her mind from her.

She’s still screaming when the drugs slam home and her world dissipates around her.

 

_Undetermined._

After John, she finds a vicious kind of satisfaction when people treat her like she expects to be treated. Like she’s exactly as dirty and sinful as the priest of her church had told her she would be if she’d broken her word and aborted the life within her.

There’s a dichotomy within her in the time after, a duality of Emily that she can’t realign. There’s the Emily she was Before John, the one who believes in her inherent value and knows she’s smart and fiery and brave and wild. That Emily is as confident and accomplished as always, tackling anything that’s thrown at her with the brash self-assurance her upbringing had installed in her and refusing to be cowed by any societal expectations that she finds to be false. And there’s the Emily of After John, the one that stands before the priest with Matthew by her side after they walk hand and hand into his services. That Emily has no baby in her belly and no spine to hold her up as the priest lashes her with his tongue and calls her a murderer, a fiend, a repulsive child with no respect for anyone or anything and especially not God’s word. A being unworthy of love or respect.

That Emily carries those words, even though the person who she was before still thinks that they’re lies. That Emily believes them.

It’s that Emily at the helm when she’s eighteen and her first college boyfriend hits her for the first time. It’s that Emily that just buckles down and takes it, figuring it’s the love she deserves, really. It’s that Emily that, after the dissolution of that relationship, struggles to find anything that feels as savagely punishing as his hands on her had been. Alcohol and drugs and other men, right up until she works out that she can put this relentless quest for self-destruction into something useful: she’s unlovable and therefore wrong so, then, she should find herself a job where she can quietly find a way to pay penance for what she’s done. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Her life for someone else’s.

It’s the Before John Emily that loves the FBI for what it offers her in agency and independence, utilising her intelligence and her street-smarts to excel.

But it’s the Emily of After that yearns for the day the wrong gun goes off.

A life for a life. Absolution for the life she’s told she ended, even though a part of her knows she did what she had to survive herself. But that argument only holds water if she believes her life is worth saving.

And this is what she dreams of the first time Hankel drugs her, lost in a sea of her past faces and wondering if anyone could hate anyone as much as she hates the teenage version of herself.

She doesn’t see Spencer; he has no place here.

No one’s ever loved her like he has either.

 

_20 hours 27 minutes._

The time after she wakes passes groggily. She feels hungover and confused, barely aware of answering the questions Hankel asks her with his father’s tongue. Something about penance. She doesn’t know. Her memories are as blurred as her brain is, left slumped in the chair with her faltering vision left locked on the ground in front of her.

The high doesn’t fade as fast as it should. Time doesn’t really have meaning to her right now, but she’s gotten stoned before. Never with opiates, which is what she suspects she’s been given judging by how slow and floating everything had felt before passing out, but enough for her to know that she shouldn’t be feeling this fucked up this far along. When he comes back and ignores her in favour of working on his computers, dragging a camera on a tripod out in front of her and setting it up with her in the eye, she tries to hang on just a little bit more to that drifting floatiness.

“Open your eyes,” he says.

She does, trying to pin him with the hate she feels for what he’s done to her, to the parts of her he’s violated with the needle in her arm, but he’s derailed her hate and left her hollow. But he just stands there with his hand on the camera, watching her impassively.

He turns the camera on. She wonders whether he’s streaming this or if it’s just for his own pleasure—if thousands of strangers are now watching her buckled down on this chair with dried lines of blood across her tits and her face patterned with stripes from his belt. She knows her mouth is hanging open garishly, likely a bloodied mass of torn lip and teeth, but she can’t close it through the pain and the struggle to breathe through a nose that’s stopped up.

A small, quiet part of her wonders if her team is watching.

A smaller part grieves the concept of Spencer seeing her like this.

“Do you really hold dominion over men’s minds?” Hankel asks, hand still on the camera and gaze boring into her. “Can you see their innermost thoughts?”

She sways a little, trying to blink and feeling her lids flicker like they’re out of sync. “Go to hell,” she rasps, refusing to play his games any longer.

Hankel doesn’t react, walking back from the camera and pressing a button on a waiting keyboard. Three screens flicker to life: a dull part of her sinks low when it sees three lives displayed, one on each.

“See these vermin?” he asks her. “Choose one to die.”

She swallows and says nothing. Feels nothing. It’s a habit she’s fallen out of, finding something deep in her mind to focus on to the exclusion of everything else, but she struggles to do so now, to completely block this moment out.

The last time she’d done this, it was the last time she’d had sex with Doyle. It’s a strange feeling to remember that she’d always done this when he’d touched her, found something kinder to think of.

Usually, she’d thought of those nights she’d spent with Spencer, the ones where he’d been Rob and her just Emily and they hadn’t had sex or even considered it… they’d just _been._

But today it doesn’t work. There’s just this cabin. Those screens. Hankel.

“Choose a sinner to die,” he keeps coaxing. “I’ll say the address of the one to live, for the other heathens watching. They’ll be saved.”

Other heathens?

Her team.

She shakes her head slowly, barely having to fake the confused slur to her voice as she stumbles out something about his sadism, his cruelty—how untrustworthy his word is. She lets her head hang, eyes closed, flinching when he wheels over to her and yanks her head up to force her to stare at those three sacrificial lives.

She needs to tell them what she knows, and before Hankel gets angry… she opens her eyes, heart thumping. It’s a stupid way to get a message across. It’s so stupid. If she gets out of here, Morgan will never let her live it down. But _he_ might understand… if anyone will, he will. He has to. She’s calling on their history together, all those quiet moments together—the parts of her she knows he treasures, all those beautiful, together moments.

“You can’t force me to be responsible for someone’s death,” she tells him, looking away from the screens. Just like she’d expected, he grabs her by her aching jaw and tries to force her to look. She closes her eyes.

He shakes her.

God, she hopes Spencer is alive to hear this.

She sings, although it’s more like a panicked kind of recitation of the lyrics of a song she desperately hopes Garcia will recognise and tell Spencer the name of. Making sure it’s kind of panicked, almost shrill, banking on Hankel’s confusion to stop him stopping her before she gets far enough in to get her point across, if Spencer’s alive to query it. Code-switching as she goes to add to the illusion of her using the song to drown out his words, one line in English, the next French.

She’s very careful which ones she picks to be French, going from, “You know you got a willing slave,” in English to, “Oublie moi au passage, J'veux reposer en paix,” right before Hankel snarls at her to shut up.

She shuts up, breathing hard and staring at him waiting for the blow to fall.

“Speaking in tongues won’t help you now,” he snaps at her, earning a soft, exhausted laugh from her as she realises he hasn’t recognised she was speaking French. “Choose one to die or I’ll kill them all while you watch.”

“Okay,” she says, struggling to control her breathing in the aftermath of the adrenaline rush. “On one condition.”

“You don’t make the conditions. I do, now—”

“My partner,” she blurts out fast, giving into the fear that’s been growing since she’d woken up from her drugged sleep. She can’t push it down anymore, all her careful walls beginning to crumble. That fragmented mind Spencer had once accused her of having suddenly and violently falling in on itself. “Agent Reid. Is he dead?”

Silence.

“Did you kill him?” she breathes. “Tell me, and I’ll choose.”

“The Satan died upon his own sword when he attempted to stop my taking you,” says Hankel in the Raphael voice, almost bored. “He paid the price for trusting his life unto someone like you.”

Emily feels something deep inside her break, folding down into the chair and shuddering with the way it doesn’t hurt, even though it should. Instead, she’s just numb.

“Centre screen,” she says quietly, hardly even hearing him tell their audience the name and address of the life she’s just saved. That life for Spencer’s.

It hardly seems worth it anymore.

 

_24 hours 5 minutes._

She’s alone in the after. There’s no sleeping. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees Spencer bleeding to death alone in the corn. Down among the stinking dirt and cloying earth, just as lost among the dead as she is. Dead, because she’d taken him in there to be killed. She hadn’t waited and called for backup, she’d taken her green-as-grass partner into a dangerous situation and lost control of it.

Alternatively, he’s dead because she didn’t trust him to stand at her side, pushing him harder and harder to hide behind her, to use her as a shield—despite knowing that the concept of letting her take a bullet for him was impossible for him to obey. She’s supposed to understand the human mind, but she’d done this knowing he’d never allow it. A complete misunderstanding of how his mind had worked, and how it worked no longer.

But she can’t think about that, or she’ll break.

Instead, she stares numbly at the screen as the scene within plays out for her haunted eyes. She watches them die, the people she hadn’t chosen. She watches their bodies cool until they’re found. She watches the forensic personnel begin to filter in. Cleaning up the mess she’s made. The lives she’s ruined.

She watches until she can’t anymore, looking away and hating herself for being unable to cry. And like that she stays, until someone calls her name.

Stupidly, she first looks to the door, a dull thrum of hope kindling and dying when she finds it still closed.

The voice says her name again. She recognises it.

And she looks to the screens.

He’s there. Kneeling in front of the camera capturing the grisly scene, Spencer is there with his expression firm and more determined than she’s ever seen it. There’s no trace of Rob’s gentle vulnerability in his eyes or face, not even a sliver. He’s all Reid, fierce and composed and determined to save the world.

“I’m alive, Emily,” he says, each and every word slamming into that broken thing inside her and bringing it thudding back to life. “Tobias lied to you—I’m alive and I’m coming for you. None of this is your fault, _none_ of it. Gideon says to remember that you’re strong. You’re strong and he can’t break you, so just hang on until we can get there, okay? And Emily?”

He pauses, like he’s waiting for her to respond, before leaning a little closer and saying in a voice that she _knows_ is now just for her and her alone, speaking to their quiet nights together and his intimate knowledge of her soul.

“When in doubt,” he says softly, “choose to live.”

If she could have, she’d have reached down to brush her fingers against the words tattooed into her hip after she’d done exactly what he’d recommended and found a new favourite book. After she’d almost died and then found a new way of viewing that rather than fanatical desire.

Instead, she just breathes again, alive again, and for the first time since waking up in this unholy cabin, she finally cries.

 

_41 hours 9 minutes._

It really does make things better. Suddenly, she understands Matthew so much more than she ever has before.

If she wasn’t so relieved for the break from this hell, that would frighten her more.

 

_Undetermined._

They’re in Room 302.

God, she’s missed this place.

“What do you want to do today?” she asks him brightly, but Rob just curls his knees to his chest and watches her with the saddest expression she’s ever seen on him. “Buffy marathon?”

“I didn’t get the message, Emily,” he says quietly. She swallows. “If I had, I’d have found you by now.”

“Yeah, well.” Emily walks over to the window, unsurprised to find that the world outside is dark and cold. Minus five and getting colder with every minute that passes. She leans against the frigid glass and stares out at the cemetery waiting for her through the foggy view. “It was probably optimistic of me to try and get a coded message to you in French, especially a Buffy reference. But hey, it doesn’t matter now. We’re together, right?”

“You’re dying,” he says.

“Aren’t we all?”

She’s trying to be glib, but it doesn’t seem to be working. When he holds his arm out, she hurtles into that offered embrace and curls in against his familiar body. The speed in which she holds him close betrays how scared she is, feeling his heart beating stronger where hers is struggling.

“Tobias didn’t realise you were speaking French,” Rob is saying into her hair, kissing her between every other word like he’s trying to fit as many in as possible before the end. Maybe he’s scared of each one being the last. “He’s not educated and anything he did know, he’s lost to the chaos of his mind. He’s manic, delusional. Confused.”

“Tell me something I don’t know…”

“He’s giving you the same doses that he gives himself, despite the vast difference between height and weight between you both.”

Emily is silent. She guesses that maybe she’d known this from the start, seeing as she’s hallucinating this and Rob isn’t really here to warn her, but it’s one thing to suspect and another to be faced with the reality that she’s on the cusp of overdosing.

“You should have let him take me,” Rob keeps saying, ignoring how the concept makes her struggling heart thump harder. “I’m the same size as him. I could survive this…”

“You couldn’t survive this,” she says with a passion, feeling everything from the past however long it’s been begin to overflow into an inescapable pain not even the drugs can dull. The hunger, the pain, the shame, the horror… “No one could survive this.”

“I’m stronger than you believe,” is his answer. “And more resilient than you know.”

It’s the truth. He is.

And she’s sorry she’s probably not going to be able to tell him that.

“Do you know I’m dying?” she asks him miserably, glancing to the window to find the outside lightening, a pull deep in her body beginning to draw her up and away from this beautiful place. “I don’t want you to know. I don’t want you to _see.”_

And he’s quiet for a moment, doing nothing but holding her while she slips away.

“I know,” he says finally, kissing her once more and letting his lips linger against her, his hand resting gently over the tattoo on her hip that she’s never had the chance to thank him for. “I knew as soon as I saw the first video… but I’m not ready to find your body, Emily. Don’t do that to me. I told you how destructive to me that would be.”

“Then don’t,” she says. “Just let me go.”

And he says, “Never.”

 

_47 hours 52 minutes._

She wakes to warmth and the drifting feeling has increased to the point where she doesn’t hurt anymore, not even a little. In fact, if it wasn’t for the vaguest sense of pressure around her wrists, she wouldn’t even really be sure that her body even exists at all anymore.

That’s not good.

There’s a distant bang. She struggles to open her eyes, but they don’t listen, her hearing coming in and out and in and out. Someone shouting, far away…

 _They’re trying to silence my message,_ she hears him snarl, but she can’t focus on it. _Do you think you can defy me?_

Even further away, she can hear Rob calling to her.

“What’s your name?” she asks him, feeling the words trip and fumble as she drifts back to sleep—

—and snaps back as she’s dragged up by the front of her shirt, the material pulling hard against all her sorest parts.

“Get off,” she rasps, trying to fight that grip but finding herself as weak as a kitten and just as petulantly useless.

“Then confess!” Hankel screams at her, spit flecking her face. If she answers, she doesn’t know, feeling her feet leaving the ground with the weight of the chair pulling her. “Confess your sins so this can end!”

“I don’t…” Emily shakes her head. Nothing makes sense. She just wants to sleep. “I, urgh.”

She’s going to be sick.

“Stop it!” someone screams at her. She blinks her eyes open, surprised to find Hankel staring at her oddly. Had she passed out? “Confess!”

All she does is shake her head, not even surprised when he lets go of her with a snarl of disgust. She lands heavily, the chair-leg buckling and flinging them both to the ground where she lies with a sense of awe at how disconnected from herself it feels to sprawl out. Her head thumps. Did she hit it? Maybe…

Maybe.

Her eyes close.

 

_Undetermined._

There’s a voice in her dying nightmare. It lilts and whispers around her, distracting her from this comforting sense of everything ending. She wishes it would go away. This is a nice death, really, this feeling like she’s drifting off into the most comfortable sleep she’s ever had. The cold cement floor under her doesn’t feel so hard or unforgiving anymore. The welts on her thighs have faded; the strips of split flesh across her chest have healed. Her sins have gone away.

She’s free.

But the voice won’t go away. It’s insistent and clawing, scrabbling at the warmth she’s wrapping around herself, this comfortable passing. She resents it a little for not realising how long she’s been searching for an end that’s kinder than anything she’s ever lived for.

 _Let me see her,_ it says, and she wonders who. _Tobias, please. ‘For God is not unjust. He will not forget how hard you have worked for him and how you have shown your love to him by caring for other believers, as you still do.’ Let me care for her, please._

_You can’t save her. She needs to be burned so that God will forgive her following her passing._

_If you don’t let me see her, I can’t help her and she’ll die. If she dies, how will you hear her confession? Just let me touch her—I won’t do anything. Just to touch her, to see if she lives._

_One wrong move and you both die here, before your heathen friends can stop me._

A hand touches her. It’s ice cold and, if she was capable of controlling her limbs anymore, she’d have jerked away from it. It presses against her throat before slipping up to cup her cheek, a shadow falling over her.

_The witch dies. I told you._

_She doesn’t have to. There’s an ambulance outside—let me give her to them and you can hold me in her place._

_You know why I can’t do that… if she’s a witch, she can’t live. She can’t._

The hand shifts and she feels, for a moment, like she’s floating. There’s complete silence around her, except for a sudden soft thump against her ear. The cold encompasses her. It takes her a second to realise that she’s being held. Someone is holding her.

For the first time, she fights whatever is dragging her down, torn by curiosity about who would hold her so gently in such an unhallowed place. But it doesn’t work. She can’t see. She can’t know.

_That’s enough. I said you could hold her, not—_

_If she’s to die, will you let me kiss her one last time? Please?_

_You’re not married. It’s a sin—_

_We would be, had she lived. Look at me, Tobias, know I’m telling the truth. We’re engaged. Let me say my final goodbye, please. I love her. I love her more than sanity allows. If she’s a witch, she must die, but the heart is weak. It grieves her. Can’t you allow a moment of human weakness before the glory of God?_

Emily isn’t really following the conversation, but she’s aware enough when she feels the shyest touch of pressure against her mouth. Off to the side, avoiding where the belt had split it down the middle, but the touch lingers.

Something damp taps against her skin, tracing a final line down her cheek towards her hair. It’s warm like he isn’t.

And the moment pauses as she focuses on that warm dampness and falls…

 

…there’s a pinch in her thigh. It stings minutely, and then more. Emily twitches, her fall slowing.

And stopping.

It’s the most horrible feeling to have something hook deep in her chest and haul her up and out of the sweet warmth she’d been happily dying in, cold flooding every part of her body in a shocking wave of agony. Her face is on fire, her chest stripped raw, her thighs screaming. She’s half-starved and dehydrated, her mouth dry and her head screaming as her stomach screams along. There’s piss drying her pants to the welts on her legs, her entire body cramped and gutted from so long in the same position, and all of that smashes into her at once in a feeling like every single hangover she’s ever had compounded into one with an added dose of withdrawal too.

If she makes a noise, it’s muffled by a burning heat against her mouth that swallows the sound and masks it.

“Don’t move,” he whispers to her through the agony. “Shh. Don’t open your eyes.”

It’s almost impossible to obey that. Her entire body wants to curl up into a dried husk like a dead spider pulling inwards, her hands curling tight as she struggles to breathe. Nausea slams hard. She can’t even hear them talking through it, fighting her body as it rebels completely against her in every way a body can rebel; a shocking reminder of just how terrible life is in comparison to the dreamless sleep she’d been offered. She wants dying back. She wants the drugs. She wants anything but this.

And she keeps wanting and wanting and hurting alongside until she loses the fight against hiding her survival and begins to choke on the spit and vomit she can’t hold back anymore, finding oblivion on that filthy floor with hands scrambling to turn her onto her side.

She’s never been gladder to pass out than she is at that moment.

 

_63 hours._

If she woke up at any point between choking on her own bodily fluids and right now, opening her eyes in a silent hospital room with muted lights and no colours on the walls, she has no memory of it. Everything beyond getting into the car with Spencer on the way to interview Tobias Hankel is a kind of horrific muddle of pain and misery with a few standout moments shining grimly in her mind.

But she’s alive. She’s alive. There’s IVs in her arms and she’s in the world’s loosest hospital gown to cover what she’s sure is an intensive amount of bandaging, but her whole body is a numb kind of nothing and she’s alive.

Turning her head hurts. Every part of her just wants to sleep, but she needs to know. Needs to see…

She can’t even call his name, just making a hoarse kind of grunt and fumbling an unresponsive hand up to touch at his hair from where he’s folded forward onto the bed beside her, fast asleep with his face flat in her blankets. Despite this, he hears her, jerking upright and staring at her with red eyes and wild hair and drool on his chin.

“Emily,” Spencer breathes at her, standing and leaning forward with one hand reaching for her before freezing as though unsure of how to touch her anymore. “Are you conscious this time?”

She nods weakly, studying him where he stands. His cheek is bruised, as is his temple, and his arm is in a sling—but he’s here and watching her like he can’t look away.

She’s also pretty sure he saved her life.

It takes three tries, but she gets the all-important words out.

“Tell me,” she rasps, trusting him to understand.

He does.

“Hankel is dead,” he says. “I shot him when he objected to my clearing your airways. We got your message—it was Garcia who recognised the song as being from Buffy, and me who recognised the scene as taking place in a cemetery. And it’s been sixty-three hours and four minutes since you were taken and I’m never going to forgive myself for taking so long to find you, _never.”_

She swallows, the motion hurting, and fumbles for his hand. Their fingers grip together warmly, him holding her tight as she looks around at the room around her.

“They have you on an opiate painkiller,” Spencer says when her eyes pause on the slow drip. “It seemed kinder than adding withdrawal to your suffering at this point, at least until they’re able to properly assess the damage done to your chest and lungs. The others know you were drugged, I had to tell them when I realised you were in danger of overdose and needed to implement a plan in preparation for that outcome. I’m sorry. I… I can’t…”

But whatever he’s trying to say chokes in his mouth and he stops, pulling away just a bit.

“Spence?” she rasps. She’s falling back to sleep but his pain is rawer than hers right now, while she’s this drugged up and barely aware. If he answers, she doesn’t hear, but charges ahead anyway. “Can you…”

She’s not really sure if she got the words out but either she did or he knows her as intimately as she’s always suspected, because his careful weight is suddenly beside her and she feels him wrap his arm around her—avoiding all her rawest parts—and holding her close as she drifts to sleep.

 _I did it,_ she dreams of assuring him. _I chose to live._


	8. March 28, 2007 – June 14, 2007

_Room 17B. March 28, 2007. 23:19._

From her seat on the balcony, Emily can see him sleeping in the rich moonlight let into the room by the open drapes. Sprawled in the ruffled bedcovers, sheets around his bare body and belly down, arms thrown up over his head like he’s protecting himself from what lurks in the dark. As her cigarette burns down, she watches the slow shift of his breathing and wonders what brought his life here intersecting hers, what brought him to this hotel room with the broken facsimile of what used to be a woman.

He rolls, eyes flickering open and darting right to her, a sleepy kind of confusion around his mouth. She keeps staring, uncaring of what he thinks of her until he slides out of the bed and walks over, opening the sliding door and leaning out without a care for his nudity. He’s thicker around the middle than Spencer is, equal amounts of muscle and fat but leaner in the legs and arms. Darker skin and a lighter smile.

“Problem, sweetheart?” he asks in that Southern drawl that had drawn her eyes to him three hours ago in a nearby bar. “Not the cuddling sort?”

She pulls on the smoke with one hand to her mouth, using the other to tug her bathrobe tighter so he can’t see what Hankel did to her. There’s a tremor in her arms and a shake to her hands, her whole body beginning to betray her.

“Don’t call me sweetheart,” is all she responds, refusing to meet his eyes. Sex makes her feel normal; it also makes her feel exposed.

“You wouldn’t give me a name. What else do you want me to call you?”

To that, she doesn’t answer.

 

_Room 17B. March 28, 2007. 07:23._

She doesn’t sleep that night. She can’t. Not with a stranger in the room. Strangely, she doesn’t want to kick him out either. He’s the first person she’s let close, physically or otherwise, since Spencer had walked into Hell and pulled her screaming back to earth—and his presence, as much as she resents it now that the sex is done with, makes her feel bizarrely safe.

Not safe enough to sleep though.

But, as though she’s making him uncomfortable with everything she is right now, he leaves anyway. By the time the sun is leaking up outside, leaving her alone with her demons, the other side of the bed is cold and Emily can’t stand to be near it anymore with the evidence of what they’ve done to each other still on the sheets and in the air around her.

She showers. Twice. Checks her cell and deletes the three messages from Spencer and one from JJ without opening them. Sends a text back to her therapist requesting a cancellation of tomorrow’s appointment. When that’s done, she showers again and this time makes sure that she uses the rough hotel sponge to viciously sluice away the dead and dying skin and scabbing from her thighs, scrubbing until her legs are red and bleeding once more. It feels like winning, in a way, like she’s forcing her body to reject Hankel’s hands on her.

She does the same to her chest, even though that hurts even more and she’s almost crying by the time she reaches where his lash had fallen over her breasts. Exhausted and bleeding and triumphant despite that because she hadn’t stopped when it had started hurting, she turns off the taps and sits motionless in the bottom of the shower thinking about the day ahead and every day ahead of that.

There are options, Emily knows. Plenty of options. She could reconfirm her appointment and see the therapist Hotch mandated and who she hates. She could ring Hotch, again, and plead her case for reinstatement. She could visit her mother. She could answer one of Spencer’s calls before he goes manic with worry.

But all she is is tired. Until she beats the nightmares that refuse to let her sleep alone or with a stranger, she’s never going to be able to function efficiently enough to claw her way back onto the team. And if she doesn’t get a handle on it soon, she’s sure they’ll just replace her permanently.

Her cell hums. Another message from Spencer, likely on his way to work.

She deletes it and goes to her bag where she knows exactly what she needs to function is hidden within. Just for today. Just so she can sleep.

Just so she can get her job back and her focus and her _life._

And not once does she admit that she’s only surviving because Hankel showed her how.

 

_Room 17B. April 11, 2007. 18:30._

After she’s reinstated, it becomes a ritual. Emily finds that she’s at good at flirting with addiction as she is at most everything else. It’s almost frightening, actually, how easily she adapts her life to making sure she fragments a section of herself into this same room with a carefully measured dose to let her sleep without the nightmares that eat away at her ability to pretend to be okay.

But as long as she keeps _this_ Emily, the one who signs in with a fake name and only ever brings strangers here, separate from Emily Prentiss who went through a terrible ordeal but is recovering spectacularly, really amazing—well, so long as she manages that then she’s sure that’s all she needs.

She overcompensates at work to quiet the soft voice of guilt telling her she’s lying to them all. She pushes Spencer away, mostly because he’s too perceptive and she’s too careful but also because she can barely stand to be naked in front of strangers now, let alone him. He’s always been able to read her and she refuses to be read right now, like he’ll taste her betrayal on his tongue when he kisses her or feel the way she’s shattering when she trembles under his hands.

Tonight, she’s high and the man with her is a sensational kind of rough. He’s not scared to push her down and she’s sedate enough to go along with it so long as he gets her off. With the drugs silencing the demons Hankel poured into her brain and the physicality of this coupling exhausting her body, she’s looking forward to a long sleep to start off the week—it might even keep the demons quiet for a few days, putting off the day until she needs to return.

But then, while she’s drifting under this stranger’s hand, he undoes her shirt and pulls it back. If she’d been more awake, she’d have stopped him. As it is, he stops himself.

“Fucken hell,” she hears him say distantly, a sick jolt in her gut rocketing her up to pull her shirt closed and tuck her shoulders in. “The hell did that?”

His hands are rough, coarse and bitter, but his eyes are so worried for her in that second that she wants to throw up.

“Nothing,” she lies, pulling the shirt tighter yet until she can feel the raw skin tearing under the pressure. They should be healed by now, said the doctors she’d seen about them right before she’d refused to return: should be healed, they’d said, if she’d just leave them alone in order to do so. “It’s nothing. Don’t stop, come on. The hell are you here for if you’re not going to put out?”

But he sits back on his heels and frowns at her, not at all the kind of man she’d expected when she’d propositioned him after—apparently, incorrectly—reading him as the kind of man who wouldn’t give a shit about her. “Got a sister works with some people,” he grunts out, his dick soft now and his eyes still disgustingly concerned. “Helps people out, girls mostly, those getting knocked about at home. Could call her, if you—”

She’s up, standing in the bare air with her shirt still pulled tight and her pants still on and the drugs not helping at all, now.

“Get out,” she snarls, feeling her emotions catch and tangle up in a horrible twist of feeling in her brain. “Get out! Now!”

He leaves, apologising as he goes. That doesn’t stop her slamming the door behind him and going for the shower, desperate to wash him from her too.

On her way, she passes her cell. Six missed calls, seven messages. All from the same number.

She ignores them all.

 

_Room 17B. June 1, 2007. 19:04._

They don’t suspect at work. Her professional life is intact, with glowing reports from the Bureau mandated psychologists assigned to monitor her and with Hotch finally letting her go back into the field without him hovering nearby. Spencer, eventually, gets the message and stops calling. Their desks beside each other in the bullpen become quiet as he stops trying to drag her into conversation, finally accepting that what they once were died on the floor of Hankel’s shack. Following his lead, the rest of the team accept that she’s coping on her own and stop trying to drag her out for drinks or for ‘girl’s nights’ at the bar.

On this night in that same hotel room, the man she’s with hits her. She could put him on his ass. She could—he’s a skinny kind of fat and off his face too, and she’s stronger than him. She could give everything he’s given her back and then some, before arresting him for striking a federal agent.

She doesn’t. She takes it. They still have sex and it’s better than it should be.

Her professional life is intact and the wounds on her legs and chest have healed, but she knows that something inside her is forever broken and there’s no fixing it.

At least this man understands that too.

 

_Room 17B. June 14, 2007. 18:32._

There’s a knock at the door this night.

“Ignore it,” says the guy she’s with tonight, a desperate pick goaded by the fact that her dealer has vanished and she’s had to resort to dodgier methods. At least when the person she’s fucking is using too, she doesn’t have to hide the marks. “Come on. Let’s get this on, right, babe?”

And he bares his teeth in what she guesses is supposed to be a smile from where she’s sitting on the edge of the bed feeling a little too messed up for the amount she’d taken.

The knock comes again. The man swears. Because he’s annoying her, she gets up and answers it.

Boy oh boy, does she regret that.

For the longest moment of her life as she stands there staring with him staring back, she wonders if this is it. Is it over? This careful dance of functional inadequacy she’s been engaging with since that night?

It feels like it’s over, and that’s almost a relief even though she knows her life is over with it.

“Get the fuck back in here, come on!” snaps her delightful companion. “Fuck!”

Spencer raises an eyebrow, distaste sketched across every line of his expression. Emily just clings to the door and tries to focus on not looking stoned, all of her tumultuous emotions giving way to raw dread.

“You need to leave,” she manages to rasp out, but it’s too late.

He’s looked at her arm. She watches like it’s slow motion the way his throat bobs as he swallows hard; she watches as that distaste turns to a deep sadness that makes him look older than he is.

She watches as all of that vanishes and turns him into a younger Hotch, fiercely bland and without emotion betraying him. Fascinated by that shift because she’s not sure she’s ever seen him like this, she doesn’t stop him when he pulls her fingers from the door and steps around her, into the room without closing it behind him.

“Who the fuck are you?” the man on her bed asks, lurching upright with his own expression a confused kind of angry. “If you’re her husband, I didn’t know shit so deal with your bi—”

“Get out,” says Spencer with that same bland ferocity in his voice. He stares the man down without reacting to his spluttering anger, his credentials in his other hand. The man, upon seeing them, goes white. “Now.”

He goes.

Emily doesn’t say a word, just stands there shivering as her the man vacates the room with a speed that’s impressive, Spencer closing the door gently behind him. There’s a terrible silence.

“How long have you known?” she finally manages without looking at him, her gaze locked on the floor by her feet.

“I didn’t know,” Spencer responds quietly. “I suspected. That suspicion was confirmed when you let me walk in and dictate your companion without a fight. You’ve never been that passive before.”

Her head jerks up, leaving her reeling a little. For a second, there’s a spark of something in her that feels like who she used to be—then it fades and leaves her drained.

“I guess this is it,” she says with a low bark of laughter. “Going to get me fired, Spencer? Going to lecture me like that sanctimonious asshole Hotchner? I’m sure a heart-to-heart will fix everything that’s wrong with me, that’s for fucking—”

“Where are the drugs?”

The words choke. She might be caught, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to show him the evidence of just how broken she is. Knowing is one thing. Seeing is another.

Maybe he sees her eyes flick to the phone, or maybe he knows that she’d do anything to get him out of here before he _sees_ , because he cuts her off midway. Suddenly, his arms are around her and she laughs for a second, because it’s hilarious that he thinks he can take her, until she realises that she doesn’t have the strength anymore to fight him. And it’s the cruellest of betrayals that he scoops her up like she’s a cat that’s made a mess and takes two easy steps despite her struggling weight to dump her on the bed. Gently, and with one hand quick to curl behind her head to stop her neck from jolting.

“Bathroom?” he asks her, breathing a little roughly and with that same focused expression. “Is that where they are?”

She goes for it, rolling out of his grip and lunging at the door.

He catches her easily. Maybe that’s a clue that she’s not as good at hiding this as she’d hope, because four months ago she could kick his ass. As it is, she can’t even stop him from tossing her back onto the bed with an _oomph_ as it knocks her air out.

“I’m not letting you leave here to buy more,” he pants at her, scrunching his fingers back through his hair to push it back from where it’s falling into his eyes. “And I’m not letting you lock yourself in there to either keep using or to hide the evidence of your using. Emily, stop _fighting_ me.”

She doesn’t. It’s this or admit that everything is over, and maybe the fact that the drugs are making her anger crueller and sharper is what gets her off her ass and going for that door again. Or maybe she’s just an idiot, snarling at him when his arm snags her around the belly and drags her back again with infuriating ease.

She kicks back and gets him in the dick, feeling him buck into her with a rasped groan. But he doesn’t let go; in fact, his arm around her curls tighter. And, when she kicks again, he dodges it, stumbling backwards and falling back with a yelp as the back of his legs hit the bed. They hit it hard, together, Spencer rolling a bit with her to stop her head from bouncing back and smashing into his chin—and then she’s fighting him like she wishes she could have fought Hankel, no rhyme or reason in her hands striking his bony chest as her legs struggle to get her upright.

“Emily, stop,” he yells, but she can’t. Doesn’t he see that she _can’t._ She stopped fighting Hankel and look what happened, she became _this_ —and she snarls again with a feeling like there’s a sob twisting up in her chest and tries to knee him off of her.

He refuses to go, all arms and legs and gentle redirection. The bed is noisy under them but they’re locked into a kind of silent fight for something that seems incredibly important to both of them that they win. She won’t give in and he won’t give up, until she can barely breathe through her rasping chest and he’s red and sweaty, and there’s a second where he’s over top of her and reaching over her head with her wrist in his hand.

She gets a good shot in, right to his ribs, but it doesn’t stop him cuffing her to the bed. As soon as the cuffs she hadn’t even known he’d been carrying click shut, all her fight drains out of her and she sags into the ruffled sheets, staring woefully at him as he collapses next to her and wraps his arms around his ribs where she’d knocked his air out. She can hear him wheezing gently.

“Well, you’ve got me now,” she spits with venom lacing every word. “You might as well be like every other man and fuck me. Come on, you know that turned me on—you finally acted like a man instead of a skinny little weed, take _advantage_ of it.”

“That’s not you talking,” he says, lifting his head a bit to look at her sadly. “I know that’s not you. You don’t equate masculinity with physicality, and I know you don’t. You’re far too smart. You’re just trying to make me angry so I leave, so you can get high, and I don’t want to hear it until you’re sober.”

“Until _I’m_ sober? Maybe this is who I am, Spencer. I’m a piece of shit addict. Come on, I just beat the crap out of you and you still think I’m some wonderful thing? I’m still the person you thought I was? Tell me you’re not that naïve.”

“We’re going to get through this,” he says, standing and walking to the bathroom with only one quick look back at her. “You’ll see.”

“Naïve,” she throws after him. He’ll see. There’s no getting through this.

 

_Room 17B. June 14, 2007. 22:48._

“I want a shower.”

He hums but doesn’t move from where he’s pretending to read a book. “Fine,” he says, looking at her but without any warmth in his expression. This is how it’s been all night, with him silent and accusing and her refusing to give in to that accusation. “But only if you either tell me where you’ve hidden the drugs or if you agree to come back to my apartment for the night.”

She glares, and he shrugs and looks back down to his book.

“How about I call Hotch and tell him you have me cuffed to a hotel bed and see how fast he fires both our asses?” she mutters under her breath, tugging at the cuffs half-heartedly. He’s stripped a pillow-case from the bed and tucked it between the metal and her wrist so her pulling at it doesn’t mark her skin, and she hates him for how caring a notion that is while he’s technically holding her captive.

“I told you. I’ll also let you go, but only if you, once again, either tell me where the drugs are or if you agree to come home with me. I’m not letting you go out to get high to prove a point and end up overdosing in some crappy hotel room where I can’t help you—”

“Ha!” She makes sure her voice is mocking even though her heart isn’t in it anymore as the downswing begins to hit and leave her nothing but tired and irritable. “That’s what this is about—you and your hero complex. You think you can swoop in and save me, huh? Like every other victim, just to make yourself feel that you’ve saved me from myself, go you, look at you. Shit, Reid, maybe you should have tried that _before_ you got me kidnapped—”

He stands, dropping the book. “You can shower but I’m going to be in the room,” he says blandly.

She stops. Had she hit a nerve?

Probably.

“Invasion of privacy,” she taunts. “Don’t I get to say no? That’s a little…”

But she stops because something horrible just flickered across his expression, some great fight he’s having with himself. She could push this. He’s clearly already fighting himself over this, over feeling like he’s stripping away her agency… it wouldn’t take much to guilt him into leaving her alone to self-destruct.

And then it occurs to her that letting him see is crueller than anything else she could taunt him with.

“Fine,” she says. “You can be in there. Bold assumption, to think I won’t use in front of you.”

A correct assumption. Even saying it to cut at him has her feeling sick to her stomach as her sense fights to reassert control now that the drugs are fading. But he doesn’t say a word, just unlocks the cuffs and rubs her wrist gently to make sure it hasn’t cut her skin before stepping back and averting his eyes as she walks past. She’s sure, in that moment, that they’re never going to be like they were again. How could they, after this?

But the affect of her sauntering out is marred a bit by her staggering, almost hitting the carpet on her knees if he hadn’t caught her. “Whoa,” he murmurs, his hands kind even though she recoils from his touch. “When did you eat last?”

“Get off me,” she hisses. He does, with a sound of frustration as he steps back and visibly frets, eyes wide and hands out awkwardly.

“If you’re dizzy already, a shower is going to make that worse,” he points out through his frustration. “You’ll faint.”

“Good! Maybe I’ll hit my head and I won’t have to deal with you anymore!”

With that, she stalks into the bathroom, trying to hide that her eyes are burning even though she’s angry, not sad. In there, she stares for a moment at the shower before giving in and sitting on the mat, all of her energy gone despite how sticky and gross she feels. When he walks in, that’s where she still is, rubbing at the crook of her arm and wishing he’d just tell her what he plans to do to her.

He doesn’t comment, just walks past and turns the tap of the bath on. “Adjust the temperature,” he says softly after putting the plug in, his sleeves rolled up as he squats back and glances at her. “I’ll get your water bottle. Don’t do anything stupid, please.”

She doesn’t. Not because he asked but just… because.

And, when he comes back, she’s standing back up and her clothes are on the ground beside her, meeting his startled gaze with a stare that dares him to look at her and she everything she’s hidden from him. Completely sober, she probably couldn’t have done this. Stoned, she probably couldn’t have either. She’s at the perfect stage of withdrawing where she’s angry enough to hurt him like this, using her body as the scarred knife to do so.

The trembling only stares when his gaze skims up from her scarred thighs up to her breasts, where the skin had split and torn and the result is garish even now it’s healed. As soon as he sees, all her fight goes and she’s left shaking with her fists bunched at her sides.

He doesn’t say anything and she whirls away from his stare, almost slipping with haste as she scrambles into the slightly-too-hot bath and sinks down. When she looks up at him, he’s just standing there still. Water bottle in hand and wearing an expression she doesn’t understand, standing slightly hunched like he’s just been struck.

Horrified that he’s not attracted to her anymore, a small part of her mind points out before digging in the knife. Disgusted with her, more likely.

She grabs for the sponge and uses cleaning her skin to try and hide her horror, scrubbing hard while staring down at her knees poking out of the water. Hating every sweep of the sponge on her body, hating the body under it, hating—

His hand catches hers, having crouched beside her while she wasn’t looking.

“You’re hurting yourself doing that,” he says quietly, taking the rough sponge from her and tossing it into the corner of the bathroom well out of reach. “Please don’t.”

“Why not?” she hisses, covering herself with her arms. “ _Look_ what he did to me, Spencer. Look what I let him do…”

They sit in silence, the tap dripping into her bathwater breaking up the moment.

When his hand touches hers, gently pulling her arm away, she lets him. With a kind of miserable fascination, she watches as he touches the scars along the top of her breast, barely brushing his finger against it, before tracing the outside of the reddened, flaking skin where her furious scrubbing over the past few months has left the skin aching and raw.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally.

She’s tired, that’s why she scoots closer with her skin squeaking on the bath in order to lean her head on his shoulder like no time has passed at all between them and now. “It wasn’t your fault,” she admits. “You didn’t let him take me, I was just being an asshole—”

“Oh no, I know that. I’m sorry now because I didn’t see how much you’ve been struggling. I knew you weren’t okay but I didn’t…” But he’s still staring at those marks. “He… he whipped you.”

She blinks.

“You didn’t know?”

“I knew. I… I think I knew without _knowing_. I didn’t… realise what that would look like.”

“Oh.”

She looks down too. For some reason, she’d really thought that they knew everything that had happened in that shack. Every last horrendous moment, from when he’d lashed her with his belt to the small defeat of when her bladder had failed her. And she’d used that against them, hating them for leaving her to suffer like that while knowing exactly what happened to her.

“I’m scared,” he says suddenly, looking her right in the eyes. She’s pinned by that gaze. “Emily, I wouldn’t let you leave tonight because I’m scared of what you’ll do if you leave. I’m scared you’ll…”

“I’m not going to accidentally OD,” she says with a soft huff, wondering why he thinks she’s that clumsy. “Give me some credit.”

“I don’t think there’d be anything accidental about it,” he retorts, stopping her stupid, selfish heart for a moment. She hasn’t considered that. Has she?

With a rush, she remembers how good dying had been in comparison to this, and knows that he’s seen that thought flicker across her face because he stands and walks out. She’s not really expecting him to come back, looking down at her scars and touching them herself while trying to imagine what they’d look like to someone not-her. Would she judge him for the scars on his body if he was in her place? Would she leave him to drown?

But he comes back, stalling out her train of thought. He’s carrying something.

“This is technically evidence but I told Hotch I’d lost it in the chaos,” Spencer rambles, kneeling by her side and uncurling his whitened fingers to show her what he’s clutching so tight. She stares at it, not understanding. “It’s just, I can’t… Emily, you need to understand. As soon as I saw the stream, I knew he was drugging you. I knew it was only a matter of time before he killed you. With his track record and with what his peers from NA told us, I knew it was likely opiates he was using which made his ignorance of your weight even more deadly… as soon as I realised this, I knew it would have to be me making the entry in to extract you, and I knew I would need this.”

“An EpiPen?” she points out, now very lost. He won’t let her take it, curling his fingers back around it like it’s something he _needs_.

“I doctored it,” he says, something dark and intense in his voice. “Naloxone reverses the effects of opiate depression, but there aren’t any auto-injectors for it currently in the market and I knew Hankel would stop me if he saw me inject it manually. So I… doctored an EpiPen to dispense it instead of epinephrine, and I kept it up my sleeve and used kissing you to mask me administering it. But when you started rousing, you were angry. Dismayed. You gave the very vivid impression of _wanting_ to have died there and… it frightened me. It still frightens me. So I kept it. And then I began to suspect you were using again and that frightened me more, so I followed you. Nothing that has happened tonight has dissuaded me of my fears.” He opens his hand again, looking down at the pen on his palm. Emily is too stunned to comment.

“Christ,” she breathes finally, reeling at what he did to keep her alive.

“You have no idea how haunted I am by finding you dying,” he whispers more to the pen than to her, it seems. “When I close my eyes, I see it without fail. You pushing me away was almost a relief because I’m barely able to push the memory aside when I _can’t_ see you. Do you know what I think of your scars?”

She shakes her head numbly.

“I _love_ them,” he says intently, now looking her in the eye like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be looking. It floors her. “I love that you’re alive to scar. I love that you’re here and able to heal, instead of cold and perfect in a grave somewhere under a pretentious headstone you’d hate. I love that I saved you and I’d do it again and again and again, no matter how many times you hated me for it—and I want you to realise that I hate feeling like I’m stripping you of your agency by my actions both tonight and in the future, but I also need you to realise that I would have taken every single lash of that belt to spare you the pain, felt every bite of the needle. I would go as far as I need to keep you safe and alive, and that’s why I recommend doing exactly as I say and not fighting me further—because I walked into that cabin expecting you to be dead, expecting to hold your body. It was the hardest, longest walk of my life, but I did it. Helping you now? It’s a cakewalk in comparison, so you know I’m not giving up on you. Ever. Even if you hate for me it.”

What else can she say but, “Okay.”


	9. Seven Days

_Day One._

Emily has no idea how Spencer manages it, but he does, getting them both off work for two solid weeks without either Hotch or Gideon saying more than, “Good luck,” to them. It’s a hint that maybe she hadn’t hid things from those at work as well as what she’d thought, which is interesting because it suggests that maybe she’s a little more valued there than expected since she’s not fired.

Perhaps they say more to Spencer. She doesn’t know. Maybe she’ll never know what went on between the three of them, but she expects it has a lot to do with Spencer’s success in walking into Hankel’s shack and bringing her out alive despite their surety that they’d find her otherwise.

He drives after observing her pack. She’s only a little surprised when he pulls up outside a familiar building, carrying her bags in and walking slower when she begins to breathe heavily up the stairs to a room she also recognises.

“That was a hint, you know,” he says quietly as she follows him to the door of the first hotel room they’d ever spent time in together. “That something was still wrong with you, that you weren’t okay. You were losing condition. Weight and muscle mass, and fatiguing faster.”

“Hard to hit the gym when half your body is lashed to shit,” she snipes.

“Oh, I understand how it happened. I’m just saying it was something I noticed.”

He unlocks the door and walks in, holding it open for her to follow him. She knows what this is, even after he silently puts her bags down and goes for his. When he returns, eyeing her suspiciously—she hasn’t left the room while he was getting his stuff, but she doubts he’s that trusting and assumes that he’s enlisted outside help to watch her—he’s carrying his own bag and one she doesn’t recognise. And, when he opens it and she peers within and sees what he’s probably not supposed to have, she swallows hard.

“This is risking your career and mine,” she tells him.

“I know,” is his answer. “But I’ve trusted you with my career before… you never told them about Rob. Rehab will be a black mark on your record. Do you trust me?”

She’d trust him with her life, and has before. Trusting him with her detox, even from opiates which is easily lethal if suffered in isolation and away from medical care?

Absolutely.

“Make sure I can’t get to that bag,” she says to him, smiling a little to temper the warning. His smile in response is as gentle as it is saddened.

“Wouldn’t recommend it anyway,” he says. “Buprenorphine and naltrexone won’t get you the high you’re looking for, and the naltrexone in particular will precipitate withdrawal. You’ll be very unhappy if you abuse them.”

She curls into a chair, takes a deep breath, and admits, “That won’t stop me.”

 

_Day Two._

It’s not as bad as expected. She feels like crap as they near the twenty-four-hour mark, but that’s about it. It feels like a bad dose of the flu and nothing really more, curled up on her armchair with Spencer doing what looks like complicated math puzzles on the couch across. There’s a documentary on Munich playing on the TV and they’ve been having a quiet, uneventful day. Emily had even slept the whole night through, which is a nice change from her usual sober nightmares.

She doesn’t know if Spencer slept, but assumes he did since he looks alert enough right now.

They haven’t talked yet.

“So, what’s the bag of meds in aid of?” she asks, craning her neck back to look at him and ignoring the sudden rush of cold sweat she breaks out in.

“Medical detox if it turns out to be more severe than what we’re willing to sustain,” he says absently. He’s itched his nose with the pen, leaving a blue mark across one nostril. “Saline in case of dehydration. Food. Eating well is integral to maintaining good health while the body is under stress. Oh, and I found a bunch of holographic jigsaw puzzles in case I thought you needed to take anger out on something that isn’t me.”

But he smiles as he says the last, so she’s sure he’s kidding. Mostly.

“Wow. Prepared. Any other tricks up your sleeve?” She’s teasing, a little, but she’s also impressed. Kid’s done his homework. She blows her nose, frowning as it continues to run, the sweats now in full swing and an uncomfortable warmth announcing the onset of a promised fever.

But she can handle it. Time for her to prove she’s stronger than Hankel and stronger than she thinks.

“I’ve been practising massage techniques in case your muscles stiffen,” he says, glancing at her. “Other than that, simply comfort measures. Keeping you busy, comfortable, destressed. And we need to discuss therapy.”

Her knee-jerk reaction is to refuse, but he’s right, damnit. And in a few hours, she’s probably going to be way too angry to admit that, so it’s best she copes with it now.

“I’m not good at therapy,” she admits.

“Neither am I, but you wouldn’t have slipped into using if you were in a healthy place. And I’m worried about your mechanisms of self-harm reoccurring as a response to becoming clean.” The pen is down now, as he inches a little closer on the couch and looks intently at her. “Em, I don’t know how else to get you to believe that nothing that happened to you in that shack is permanent. Not physical, nor mental. Mentally? Therapy is what will help you.”

“And physically?” she asks sourly, feeling her chest burn with the thought in stripes of searing red.

“Physically you’re gorgeous to me and you always have been,” he says firmly. “If you want to take steps in the future to reduce the scarring, I’ll support you if you still want me in your life to do so. If you don’t? I support that too, because all I don’t see your scars when I look at you. I see Emily, the Emily I love, even if she’s hard to spot under all the hurt you’re carrying right now.”

“No promises,” she says.

“That’s fine. But if you don’t go and you relapse, it will be twice as hard for you to get clean again. You need to treat the root cause. You need to tackle what drove you to it… if that’s Hankel, then you need to tackle that. But I think it might run deeper, don’t you?”

She tenses hard, thinking again of Doyle and wondering how much Spencer knows about her, just how discerning his sharp eyes are.

“Just saying,” Spencer murmurs, going back to his puzzle. “When I met you, you were prone to self-destruction. I don’t think that’s changed, you’ve just gotten more efficient about it.”

That thought occupies her for the rest of the night.

 

_Day Three._

He’s sleeping on the couch, as dumb as she tells him that is, but it doesn’t sway him. Emily listens to him talking to someone on his cell out on the balcony, curled up in bed with the blankets piled around her and half buried in a pile of Kleenex. She feels shitty and tense, with a clawing anxiety making her brain race in circles, but it’s nothing she can’t cope with. When he comes back in, she asks him who he was talking to just so the paranoid whispering in the back of her mind doesn’t win.

“Mom,” he answers, climbing onto the couch and rearranging his blanket around him. It’s hot outside, but they have the aircon on full blast in here because her fever is sporadic and it’s easier to warm her up than cool her down. “She’s doing okay, just had a bad night and wanted to make sure I was still alive. She asked about you.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That you’re not well but you’re getting better. She told me to be gracious to you in the tough times in order to earn your love in the good ones.” He laughs gently, and she smiles with him despite her anxious brain. “Sorry. She’s a bit of a romantic… I’ve told her we’re not involved like that, but she does dream.”

It’s dumb, but she whispers, “We could be.”

He’s quiet. She wonders what he’s thinking, and knows he’s going to turn her down gently.

“You shouldn’t start romantic relationships while you’re recovering,” he says finally.

“But I’m not starting one, am I?” she asks. “Look around this room, Spence. We met here. We had sex, mostly, the first time here. We’ve spent years learning each other, and it all started in this room. I fell in love with you here, you know. I don’t think that ever changed, not really, even if it got… waylaid a bit, with what happened when I was transferred. So really we’re just continuing something.”

He’s quiet for the longest time. So quiet that she can hear her sheets shifting gently every time she starts to shiver before the fever comes back.

“I feel the same,” he says. Which is obvious really, she thinks—he’s _here,_ isn’t he? But nice to hear spoken anyway. “And when this is over, I’d… I want us to reconsider who we are to each other. I want to be more. But not right now.”

“Deal,” she tells him. “Goodnight, Spencer.”

“Goodnight, Em. Sleep well.”

She’s sure she will.

 

 

She doesn’t.

The nightmare is cruel and, what’s crueller, is that it doesn’t fade when she wakes. It’s been a long time since she’s had a bout of sleep paralysis, but it happens tonight. Snapping awake, but not fully, she finds herself staring at the ceiling with her body refusing her commands, the sheets soaked with sweat under her, and her heart racing so hard she can hear the blood in her head rushing with it. The fear is intense. It clutches at her chest and pulls tight, a line of sweat trailing down her head, and she can’t open her mouth to make a sound even as the surety that _something is near her_ slams hard into her brain and refuses to let go.

Spencer is near her. It takes every iota of strength she has, but she manages to turn her head to stare at the darkened corner where his couch is, staring hard at the shape of him. The shadows play tricks on her, making an unfamiliar mockery of what she can see of his face. She tries to rasp his name, heart still hammering. It feels like if her heart keeps up like this, it will surely kill her, even if the danger looming doesn’t.

No sound comes out. She’s going to die here, paralysed and afraid, and he won’t even be able to hear her calling for him. There’s nothing more gutting than that thought. It seizes her completely, and she knows that she’s crying silently with tears running from the corners of her eyes.

She’s sure, for a heartbeat, that someone is behind her. Leaning over her, the shadows in her frozen peripherals moving and sharpening and shifting into the shape of a man, a…

Spencer rolls over, sitting up a bit and glancing over at her. “Em?” he whispers, clearly being careful not to wake her. She whimpers. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

And a light flickers on, her entire body relaxing with it as he darts up and slides onto the bed beside her, hand fumbling for her wrist. He looks startled when he feels how rapid her pulse is.

“Nightmare,” she says out loud before realising she can speak. “Oh, _Spence.”_

And she’s up in his arms, curled in close and shuddering with the fear that’s quickly fading. He holds her close, rocking her like a child in the dead of night as she cries into his shirt.

“Stay with me,” she begs him.

He stays.

 

_Day Four._

The nausea sucks, but that pales in comparison to the depression. Emily’s never felt anything like this before. It sucks everything out of her, leaving her listless on the bed while Spencer exists around her. It doesn’t even feel like they’re on the same earth anymore, with her numbly wondering how he can seem to flick through so many emotions when all she is is the same deadpan nothingness.

The hunger is there but dampened hard, and she refuses the drugs he offers her.

“You need to eat,” he tells her.

She just closes her eyes and thinks of nothing.

 

By the fourth day, the depression and nausea have settled in as her constant companions. Spencer tells her that her symptoms have peaked which means what she has now is likely the extent of it, and he says that like it’s a positive since without any vomiting or diarrhoea she’s unlikely to need medical attention. It doesn’t feel like a positive to her. The depression brings with it a cynical disregard for everything, until she’s wondering what the fuck the point of any of this is.

It also doesn’t help him as he attempts to distract her while she’s flopped on his couch staring blankly at the TV she refuses to switch on.

“Would you like me to read to you?” he asks, putting the blankets she’s irritably thrown off back on her. “What book would you like? I’ve read enough, I’m sure I can think of something—”

“Can’t you just be quiet?” she snaps. “Your voice is like nails, it’s aggravating. Why are you even bothering?”

The blanket slides to the ground again and she rolls to press her face against the back of the couch, determined to ignore him and just marinate in misery.

“You need to be distracted,” he says firmly. “We can do something silent. A puzzle? Charades? Massage? Would you like another bath? Or I can make some food—”

Her stomach bucks at the idea of eating and she groans, curling in tighter.

“You need to eat.”

No, she doesn’t. She can survive on sheer spite and anger.

“You also need to drink. You haven’t had anything to drink in approximately seventeen minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Here.”

She buries her face deeper into the couch.

“If you’re not going to cooperate with me, then I’m not going to cooperate with you. I won’t be silent. What can I talk about?”

Emily growls a warning, but he’s unperturbed.

“Well, this is the story of my life beginning from when I was born. The doctor who delivered me was a portly man of Polish descent and, I believe, Mom said that he had a fondness for roses, as expressed when he saw flowers that my Great-Aunt Marge sent her. Those roses, when adjusted for inflation, today would have cost Great-Aunt Marge approximately twenty-eight dollars and seven cents—”

Emily sits up and stares daggers at him.

“I have another twenty-seven years to get through,” Spencer warns her.

“I hate you.”

“Good,” he counters. “That means I’m doing my job.”

 

_Day Five._

By this point, she’s angry as well as depressed. He has her sat at the table like she’s a toddler with a plate of food in front of her. She resists the urge to flip the plate, or to flick it at him petulantly.

He sits across from her, eating placidly. It’s amazing how he’s resisting the urge to climb the walls of the room that she’s starting to feel dangerously penned into after days without leaving. Much longer and she’s going to throw herself over the balcony just to escape.

“I’m not hungry,” she tries.

“Eat it,” is his uncaring response. She wonders what happened to the Spencer who _cares._ This one clearly doesn’t. “Don’t act like a child. It’s unbecoming.”

“You sound like my mother.”

Spencer continues eating calmly, a book in his other hand. The food, as Emily picks at it, tastes like nothing.

“You’re a shit cook,” she tries, giving into the snarly knot in her chest that’s angry and wants him to be angry too. But all he does is turn the pages slowly, eyes skimming the words, and that’s infuriating. “If you’re going to hold me here, can’t you at least order in? Something fucking _edible.”_

“Everything is going to taste bland,” he replies. “Your taste receptors are numbed by the way your brain has adjusted to the heightened sensations caused by—”

“Christ, I said the food was crap, I wasn’t inviting a lecture.” Emily shoves the plate away, leaning her elbows on the table and her head into her hands, digging her palms into her eyes. “Are you always this obnoxious, or is it new? I don’t remember noticing it before, but I guess it must have always been there or else Ethan would have stayed—”

His inhale validates her cruelty. She’s gotten to him.

There’s a small, deeply hidden twinge of something right down in her chest as he puts his fork down, staring now at his book with his eyes so focused she knows he’s not actually reading anymore. But at least his appetite is ruined now too; she can take solace from that.

It doesn’t stop her feeling a little guilty.

“That was mean, I’m sorry.” Her mood flips so suddenly from mean to miserable that she doesn’t know what to do with herself, suddenly finding herself tearing up again as she realises how much that would have hurt him. “I don’t know why I said that, I didn’t mean it. I’m fucking horrible, jeez, no wonder no one can stand me—”

“Don’t spiral,” he says quietly. “I know you didn’t mean it.”

“No, don’t excuse my behaviour—you’ve put your whole life on hold to be here with me, and I’m treating you like crap. I’m not worth shit, let alone all the time you’re pouring into me. I wish I never hired you all those years ago… I wish you were free of me.” Now she really is tearing up, turning her chair away from him as a warning that she doesn’t want him to look at her tears because she knows they’re irrational and weak. “I ruin lives. I ruined Matthew, I ruined John, now I’m ruining you. And I lie, all I do is lie to you, always. I don’t tell you anything about my life, but I expect the world, and—”

He comes around the table, pulling out the chair beside her and trying to take her hands, which she pulls away from him.

“I have no friends,” she continues breathlessly, working herself right up now that she’s started. “I’m immoral, I’m aloof. I don’t connect with people, I’m cold and heartless and bitchy and I can’t control my emotions as well as my mother and I manipulate people just like I did the day I met you and I’m fucked up, I’m so fucked up, half my attraction to you was because I couldn’t have you. How fucked is that? I _shouldn’t_ have wanted you, so I did, and now you’re stuck with me.”

“You were the first person who ever loved me who wasn’t a family member or obligated in some way to do so,” Spencer says, cutting off her diatribe. “You loved me singularly and without fail for some unspecified time after we met right up until now, I think. But in that time before we were apart, I’d never been as loved as that. Ever. Do you know how important that was?”

She nods, very aware of how dangerously intoxicating love when one is starved of it can be.

“So you know how important you are,” he finishes firmly.

Her nod this time is a little more uncertain.

“I don’t really know what else to say,” Spencer adds, tilting his head to the side and using a single finger to catch a tear that’s about to drip from her chin. “That’s it. That’s everything. You’re important. Please believe me.”

When he kisses her, she lets him. Like he said, it’s probably not smart or the right time or the right place, but it sure does feel right in that moment.

And, for that brief second, she believes him completely.

 

_Day Six._

She’s exhausted and still distinctly salt-scented when she comes out of the shower with a towel wrapped around her to find him sprawled fast asleep in a kitchen chair, two bunched up beach towels under him to try save the chair from his damp shorts.

Honestly, she thinks as she stops and studies him, today proves how much he loves her like nothing else would. The man hates beaches and he hates showing his knees—there are few things he hates more than that, and yet he’d surprised her this morning by announcing that they were going to spend the day at the beach to both exhaust her enough to try and ensure a dreamless sleep while also getting sun to aid the depressive symptoms and to get them both out of the hotel room.

But here he is now, in bright blue board shorts that she knows he must have bought solely for this day and slightly sand-encrusted still around the toes. Knocked out cold at the kitchen table waiting for his turn at the shower because he hasn’t been sleeping either and he’d still driven her out there and kept his good mood the whole day.

“Spence,” she says, kneeling beside him and saying his name again when he doesn’t twitch. He’s warm to her hands, probably a little burned despite his ritualistic application of sunscreen on them both—the parts of her skin she’d showed anyway, keeping both long pants and a long-sleeved shirt on even in the water. “Hey. Wake up. Your turn.”

He still doesn’t wake up, so she kisses him. It feels right at the time.

When she opens her eyes, his are open too and he’s smiling against her mouth.

“Hi,” he says, kissing her again before sitting upright and rubbing his neck with a groan. “I’ve missed you.”

She’s about to snark that she’s been here the whole time, right before she realises. She feels… okay. Not amazing, mostly exhausted, but _okay._ And he sees that.

“I think you’re a bit magic,” she tells him honestly before standing him up and leading her sandy, sleepy almost-but-not-quite-boyfriend to the shower.

 

_Day Seven._

They’re in bed together when she decides that she never wants to lose herself like that again, thinking back over the past few months with a shudder as she struggles to recognise herself in the person she’d been.

“I thought maybe we could go for a drive next week, before our leave ends,” Spencer is saying quietly, on his side with his hand under the pillow and his other hand resting on her hip. They’re naked, but it feels inconsequential after everything, and Emily is relishing not being a sweaty, shivering mess for the first time all week. “I called Matthew’s rehab and they’re allowing visitors now. It would be confronting for you though, and I don’t know if—”

“I’ll do it,” she says without giving herself time to think it through. “Spence, I almost became him… that’s terrifying. I’m terrified by that. And the thought that it’s not over? That I could relapse? I need to know I can make it through that fear, or that I can face it. And… I think it would be good for me to see him, to know he’s alive and okay, sort of.”

Spencer nods slowly. “We could see Ethan on the way back,” he adds.

“I like how you say ‘could’ like I’m not going to drag you in there kicking and screaming,” she teases. “He’s going to love you. Who wouldn’t?”

But all Spencer does is hum gently, watching his hand as he traces the outline of her tattoo.

“It’s a quote,” she tells him, looking down at it too. “Terry Pratchett.”

Recognition flickers. “ _Thief of Time,”_ he says. “Why not _Cat’s Cradle?”_

“Because…” She takes a deep breath, before nuzzling closer and smiling against his chest. “Someone once told me that I should consider choosing a new favourite book… one with a more optimistic moral. And I adore Susan.”

Spencer laughs, curling in close and continuing to laugh like it’s the best thing he’s heard all day. “Death’s granddaughter?” he asks, still laughing. “Oh, Emily… that’s perfect. She’s perfect for you. And sensible, I’m told.”

Emily kisses him. It feels like an important kiss, for all that there’s nothing sexual or intense or otherworldly about it. It’s just a kiss as many other kisses have been and many more will be, which is probably where its power comes from. It’s a kiss that suggests there’ll be many more kisses yet, because the normality promises that she hasn’t broken them entirely.

“A terrible character flaw, to be sensible,” she responds pertly.

“Fortunately,” says Spencer, “neither of us can really be considered to be anything approaching it.”

And he’s really not wrong, which is probably why she loves him so.


	10. Epilogue

_Room 302. October 28, 2009._

They go back to that hotel just one more time in the years that follow.

It’s Emily’s idea, of course it is. Most of their wilder plots are Emily’s idea—that’s a lie, Spencer does come up with a few ones out of left field himself—so that surprises neither of them. What’s surprising are the elements Spencer adds to it.

Emily’s alone in the room, floating around and looking at everything waiting for the knock at her door. She’s in a sapphire dress with her hair in a bun and she’s bored bored bored, even as she finds that the hotel hasn’t changed anything about this place despite the time that’s passed. It’s amusing to find the same wonky bath fittings, the same horrible tiles she’d once kneeled on to throw up after overindulging at one of her mother’s dinners, the same bed…

The knock comes and she saunters over, tugging the door open and being unable to stop her grin when she sees him standing there, dressed exactly as he’d been almost ten years ago to the day. He has the same pretty mouth but his bangs are gone, cut short and ruffled artfully in a style she’s never going to stop teasing him about. There’s nothing vulnerable or breakable about him anymore, and there’s no glossy book with his face pictured in it.

“Miss Prentiss,” he says smoothly, his grin just shy of cheeky. “I believe you hired me this evening. I’m Rob.”

“Don’t call me miss,” she responds, dragging him in by his tie and hauling his skinny ass over to the bed. “Help me get out of this damn dress or I swear I’ll be asking for a refund.”

“No refunds once the product is opened,” he says into her mouth, all roving hands and hungry kisses. It’s not very in character, but she’s been waiting almost half an hour for him to get here and she’s beyond waiting. “God, Emily, turn around.”

He’s groaned a little as he says this, spinning her and unzipping the dress with a haste that Rob definitely wouldn’t have showed. His mouth on her back is slower though, laying lines across her back that she leans into with a soft hum of contentment.

But they had a plan.

“So,” she breathes, enjoying his hands easing the dress down so she can step out of it and stand in front of him in just her slip, turning to enjoy his pretty suit and crumpled tie. “How old are you, Rob?”

“Nineteen,” he murmurs, moving his mouth to her shoulder and licking up to her collarbone, crowding up close. His hands are around her ass, pulling her close, and he’s already hot and ready to go. That polite cock she’d accused him of having all those years ago is awake and insistent, every part of her willing to give it exactly what it wants as soon as they’ve worked each other up. “Just nineteen, ma’am. I’m legal.”

She laughs a little at that, choking it back when he shoots her a wry glance. No offence to him and she loves him dearly, but it’s a hard pass for nineteen now—although he’s definitely aging nicer than she is, the bastard.

“I’m going to hell,” she declares, earning a real laugh from him as he gives up coaxing and instead picks her up to drop her unceremoniously onto the bed, earning a yell from her and a loud complaint from the over-worked springs. “Spe—Rob!”

“Sorry,” he says, clearly not sorry at all. At least, not sorry if the hand between her legs is anything to go by, the one that’s working her up without a pause and certainly not like the nineteen-year-old Rob would have managed.

She doesn’t really mind, especially as he clumsily strips down without standing up, her having to help him before he strangles himself with his tie. Then her slip is on the floor, he’s finally managed to get everything off except one sock, and his face is between her thighs with the energy of a much younger man. This time, when she moans his name—Rob, of course, they’re working hard to keep the illusion of their do-over up—she means it. She can’t remember the last time they were this enthusiastic in bed, if she’s not counting this morning before the madhouse had begun.

“You’re good at this for a virgin,” she manages when he lets up and returns to her mouth, kissing her and making a delightful mess as he does so.

“I’ve had a very good teacher,” is his pert response. That polite cock isn’t so polite anymore, nudging against her a little as he shuffles close and slides a leg over hers. “Very, very good.”

“A good student should be rewarded,” she counters, rolling to pull him on top of her. He teases a little, like he does when she’s feeling saucy, slipping his dick between her legs and using it to coax her further up against him until she’s grumbling under him. “And you’re going to stay a virgin if you keep this up, bucko.”

That earns a laugh.

“Shouldn’t we discuss contraceptives?” he asks innocently, despite the fact that his hand is busy lining himself up to push into her right now, his hair no longer artfully arranged but now far more ‘carnal’ in appearance. “Boy like me, working as an escort… what on earth would I do if the worst happens?”

“Buy a lot of books,” she breathes, barely managing to keep her heart in the role in anymore. He’s slowly sliding in, his cheeky expression fading into a glorious kind of pleasure as he looks down and watches himself enter her. When she tries to play along a little more, her response comes out thin and breathy and exactly like the lie it is: “I’m on the pill.”

She actually feels him shiver; it goes right from his legs alongside hers and into his dick buried in her, and up further to his eyes that flicker closed. “I hope not,” Spencer says, definitely not Rob in this heartbeat of time. “By my calculations, this would be the worst time possible for you to have unprotected sex if the worst is what you’re hoping to avoid.” His smile, when he glances down at her is wicked. “Why, it would be downright irresponsible, in fact, unless the worst is what you’re hoping for.”

She launches up to kiss him, feeling him warm and firm along all of her as he returns that kiss. His eagerness to knock her up is sweet, despite the fact that they’ve been trying for seven months now and she’s starting to suspect that it’s not going to happen. But, hey, what more awkward time for conception to occur then when they’re roleplaying ‘the time Mommy took Daddy’s virginity’?

He doesn’t question why she laughs at that moment, just goes oddly focused for the longest beat of time before she realises how weird it would feel for him to feel her laugh around him.

“I love you,” he says out of the blue and clearly meaning it completely and truly.

“Rookie mistake,” she pants, beginning to move her hips along him as they hurry towards a glorious end. “You never say you love the person you’re losing your virginity to. It’s all hormones, Robbie, my boy.”

“No,” he gasps back, movements erratic enough now that she knows he’s close. “Not playing, Em. _I_ love you. Me, right now. I love you and I love that we’re here and oh god, I’m probably about to come.”

He’s definitely about to come. He gets so astoundingly sappy when climaxing.

“I love you,” she tells him firmly, sitting up again despite how much harder it makes it for him to thrust and hugging him close. It gets him deeper, at least, for maximum conception chances, or so she privately thinks and hasn’t double checked with him just in case he ruins it for her. She hasn’t come yet, but she doesn’t mind—they have all night for that, and then the following week away.

When he goes rigid against her and huffs out a long exhale against her shoulder, she’s not surprised to feel his hand sneak between them; she always crests a little within him and so he’s still in her when he manages to get her over the edge as well with his fingers and her clit, humming contentedly into her skin when her breathing slows with his.

Her cell rings.

“Well, that’s unpleasantly reminiscent of the past,” Spencer quips, twisting around and pulling a little bit out of her as he peers at the screen. “It’s your mother.”

“Ignore it,” she says sleepily, flopping back onto the bed and enjoying the lull before he starts lecturing her about UTIs.

He’s quiet for a moment. “Are you sure you don’t want me to tell her about our sex lives?” he says, curling up beside her. “I was hired to horrify her, I believe.”

Emily rolls her eyes at him. “Honestly, she’s calling me three hours after the end of our wedding,” she says, glancing at the clock. “At this point, all she should _expect_ is a rendition of our sex lives.”

That earns another laugh as he flops down beside her.

“Besides,” Emily says, “I don’t think fucking me fucking the escort was ever as horrifying to her as the concept that I just married him.”

Spencer hums, Emily watching as he traces his fingers over the not-so-recent addition to the tattoo on her hip, the one that, for so long, served its purpose in telling her to live and now serves an additional purpose on top of that: right under the _When in doubt, choose to live_ line working to hide the old bullet scar, there’s a new line.

_And while living, remember to hope._

She intends to.

**Author's Note:**

> I love to hear from you guys. Leave a comment or come chat with us on the [Criminal Minds Discord server](https://discord.gg/kPxKjaE) (don't be shy by how quiet we are--we love new people to talk to!). I also run weekly rewatch threads both on the server and over at the /r/[criminalminds on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/criminalminds/), so come along and join in the small community there. Hope to see some new faces!


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